Heh, that word got me too! So, does each episode end with somebody being poisoned by all these "poisonous" plants or what?

All kidding aside, I know Michael has mentioned this Australian thing before, and it sounds ideal. And a good cottage garden composition is a great thing indeed.

I just meant someone who can't get enough of Cottage Gardens.

And for good reason. A very nice composition can be achieved.

Very cool.

Somewhere I have some notebooks full of newsletters that I bought at an estate sale. One of the newsletters tells all the plants to put in a tropical cottage garden. I know that Louis Phillippe rose and tropical red sage were in there, but can't remember the rest. I had just moved to S. FL and didn't know half the plants he talked about. One day when I get totally unpacked, I'll have to dredge that back up.

I think Michael means "addicts" or "fanatics." I know that sometimes the right word totally escapes me, and I'm a writer!

Yes and no. I have heard Tragic used as an overexaggeration for someone who is really into something. In this case it would be akin to saying, "Oh my! I just don't know what I shall do if I don't have a Cottage Garden in Florida! Oh the pain! The horror! I must find a way." Way dramatic, I know, and I doubt anyone is THAT bad off, but that is what I was going for.

AH! I see. Well, I sort of have a cottage garden, because I just stick stuff here and there where I think it needs to be with no rhyme or reason. I grow edibles and herbs and ornamentals all together, just like in a true cottage garden.

Thanks, Michael!

For the Lazies, including me:
"Gardening Australia": Download episodes

Carol in Jacksonville

Thanks for the link Carol. I grow roses and just started growing the antique roses last year. That will have to be cottagy enough lol. I did have some spider cleome plants one year in pinks purple &white..I really liked them but they died off in summer and even though they made lots of seeds they never came back.

I love true cottage gardens and in a different universe would love to have one here, but I have to admit I've never seen one in FL that hit the right spot for more than a few weeks before it became just a buggy jungle.

Thank you Carol, I qualified as one of the Lazies, I will look after I comeback from doing chores....maybe there is something I can learn but like Writersblock said a buggy jungle? is not for me.:)

Silvia

After watching the episode, the garden is, as they say repeatedly in the episode, more of a country garden than a cottage garden. However, it doesn't take much to see that a slight rearranging and bringing the plants in closer would give a much more cottagey feel. I will say it was kind of cool seeing our very own Stoke's Aster featured.

Michael, thanks for letting us know about this. It was very interesting! Too funny, I kept wondering who this "Bob" the gardener was... and then I realized the gardener's name is Barb!

And aren't those some wild eyeglasses she's wearing? Kinda hard to take her seriously at first. But "Bob" obviously knows her stuff.

There is a nine-minute streaming version (vs download). Be sure to check out the incredible tree-form loropetalum at 1:27. It is enormous! I recently planted two that I will prune into trees. Boy, the ones in the video give me something which to aspire!

Carol in Jacksonville

I have already ordered seed for Hyssop Anise and South African Foxglove. Looking forward to growing both. I asked a nurseryman yesterday about the 30 ft Loropetalum and he confirmed a 'fear' of mine. You have to get the right variety to get that height and those varieties are hard to find here because the public at large wants the shorter types.

Edit: And one thing I have noticed through the years of this program and others is that the best gardens often have rather eccentric gardeners. Those glasses were quite tame compared to other things I have seen, so much so that I barely even noticed them.

Michael, I wondered about that, too. I did a little research before I purchased my two "trees". (LOL, "trees" - they are two feet tall!) The variety recommended for tree-form is loropetalum 'zhuzhou' so that is what I bought. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that is what I actually have. And that it will work. :)

You and everyone else here has taught me to do homework before making a plant purchase. File that under the "tips and tricks".

I have a habit of walking up to people's houses and asking for cuttings. I meet a lot of those "eccentric" gardeners, in fact, I am one. I think being a little bit off kilter from the rest of the world is a requirement for being a gardener. I lived with someone once who called herself a gardener, but she didn't even know what she had planted in her yard, didn't know the names of anything, or how to take care of them. She would just read something or see something on social media and decide she wanted that, then buy and plant it -- or just leave it in the pot interminably. It would usually die, because she didn't take care of it. I guess I'm a gardening snob, because I feel like if you want to grow something, you should at least learn it's name and how to grow it. I can tell you every single thing planted in my little space here, and could have done it in my 1/4 acre yard. Plants are more than just pretty things to me. Maybe I'm just weird.

I guess I just don't understand how a tree's height is measured. I keep searching for a variety of Loropetalum that would get as tall as the one in the segment, but the tallest I can find is about 12 ft (Monrovia says the Zhouzhou only gets about 8 ft). I found information on the China Pink cultivar and it seems to be an Aussie Cultivar (I wonder if they would ship to here...), but even the information for that cultivar says only about 4 meter (13 ft). I went back and rewatched the segment and used the bench under it as a scale. Assuming the bench is 3 ft tall, that tree looks to be at least 20 ft.

Michael,

It's just my opinion, but even in the age of all of the internet sharing of information, I think there is a lot of inaccurate information in the gardening world. I could give you several examples (all just my opinion), but this thread may go awry.* I think that because, if you Google and read extensively on just about any plant, you start to notice that all of the information starts to sound really, really familiar - and I believe that the true source of the information was probably one, lone article - and everyone else borrowed and rephrased.

So back to your question about loropetalum. My opinion is that almost any of the standard (non-dwarf) varieties can be grown to be fairly tall. Did you see this thread (link below) from 2011? This is a plain-jane loropetalum - probably Ruby - that I think came from my yard, actually. When I first moved in, I tore out some plants (I knew nothing about gardening and was a first-time home owner) and I gave them to my neighbor who "managed" the berm around the lake. He took them and planted them across the lake (which is against the main road into the neighborhood - so no one lives there). So I think this thing actually came from my yard and is easily 20+ feet tall:
Huge Loropetalum (Chinese Fringe Flower) - Photos

Also, one of my neighbor has loropetalum along the side of her house and the entire row is hedged flat across the top at 10 feet, along the roof-line. These loropetalum would easily like to be much taller, except that she shears them off.

Because loropetalum has been thought of and used as a shrub for so long (heck, one of it's common names is "Fringe Bush"), I don't think there is a lot of "good" (accurate) information, authoritatively published, on mature, non-crape-murder-style pruned loropetalum. (In fairness, the Edis/IFAS publication does say 6 to 15 feet.)

Carol in Jacksonville

* Let me know if you want to hear more, LOL!

Carol, your hypothesis has merit in my opinion. To steer this in a slightly different direction-and this too is controversial-the plant purple loosestrife is everywhere (that it grows) the poster plant for invasive species. And yes, I have seen entire wetlands completely dominated by this plant. Yet a very good review of the literature-a meta-study if you will-showed that by and large, "new" research was just parroting the old, and that in some cases, the "source" for info was magazine articles! That is to say, there is actually very little to no true evidence that this beautiful bloomer actually harms these sites in the long term. Instead, it seemed each new wave of research was just relying on that which had already been said. Maybe I'm biased about this one particular case-I simply love the bright magenta flowers-and their strong attractions to bees and other pollinators-of this species, and I wish it was not placed in the category that it is. But the person who wrote up the paper I reference really had me thinking-and re-thinking just exactly what the impact of this supposedly bad bad bad plant was on the landscape. He made compelling argument that this was largely trumped up.

Laughing, because as an internet writer, I can attest that what Carol said is true. It starts out as an article that uses an authoritative source, such as UF/IFAS, then the facts just get reused over and over again in other articles. I can't tell you how many articles I've written with the same facts in them, just put into different context. It's like the old adage about there only being 7 stories in the world. There is only one way to do a lot of stuff in horticulture, and we writers try to change it up a little to get paid, like "How to Grow Hibiscus In Containers," or "How to Grow Hibiscus in Clay Soil," etc., etc., but no matter what we write, some facts about growing hibiscus never change, so all the articles start sounding alike.

There is a plagiarism detector that looks for any four words in the exact same order in other articles online. It's almost impossible not to get at least one or two hits. I've become an expert at what I call "thesaurusing" articles so they don't get matches. Sometimes, people actually will pay writers to just rewrite an existing article so it passes the plagiarism checkers. In copyright circles, this is known as "repurposing" and you can get sued for it, but the thing is, if you're good enough so plagiarism checkers don't flag it, you'll never get caught.

Tom, thanks for having my back, LOL! I appreciate it. In what you wrote above, you articulated my thoughts precisely. "Parroting" and "relying on what has already been said" is exactly what I often find in my internet plant research.

Mike, I went to visit the loropetalum across the lake this morning. The blooms are past, but I took some updated photos:

On the photo below, the red line near the top of the pampas grass marks my height of 5'4". The red line near the top of the photo marks the peak of the loropetalum. The plant is covered largely by nasty vines like Virginia Creeper and kudzu. So I have to amend my previous guestimate that it stands at over 20' tall... a better guess is 15'+ tall:

As you can see, it is growing wild and free in the berm, mixed in with some other "shrubs" like a ligustrum:

One of the trunks (it is multi-trunked):

It's top branch winds up to the very top left side of the photo below. The base of the trunk is on the lower right side:

Carol in Jacksonville

Next, I called my neighbor and got her permission to take some photos of her loropetalum hedge. She planted the hedge to shade the south side of her home to keep the walls from heating up in summer. She told me that the hedge was just pruned back last week.

Here's a photo of the trunks:

She sent me this photo from a couple years ago:

Carol in Jacksonville

One of the old standbys for pruning hedges-this really only applies to plantings that get sheared-is to make sure to leave the base just a wee bit wider than the top. That way, sunlight continues to reach all plant parts so you don't end up with leggy things with no growth at their bottoms. Some evidence in these pics that this technique was not followed here, although the loropetalums are far from toast.

Then, I took a walk down the the street to another neighbor who has two of them that got out-of-control. They are on the side of the house and were left to do their own thing. You can't miss them in spring - the pink blooms can be seen from the street over the top of the house and everything in the front yard!

I don't believe these were any special variety. I think they were installed by the builder/developer around twenty years ago when the neighborhood was developed. I think they are builder-grade plants.

So I hope these photos were helpful and you try some loropetalum trees. Keep us posted on progress!

Carol in Jacksonville

Well, I think is time for my mini loropetalums...

The hedge

And the mini tree, I don't keep the tags so I don't know what they are. It was blooming recently, after a few years planted I still keep it at 3 or 4 feet

Silvia

Carol, I love what your neighbor who manages the conservation area did with the tree ! I also live across the lake from a buffer/conservation area and one of these days I'm going to get over there and start planting!!!

Has anyone seen the beautiful specimens they have at USF ? I bought one, but unfortunately I murdered that one and will have to start over again now that I know what a beautiful plant it is.

And Michael...so glad you started thread!!! it's been very informative and interesting. And you know I LOVE all gardening shows!!!

Silvia, I love your mini-hedge. It's so cute! It might hold back a dachshund, LOL. Do you have to trim it or does it maintain that height on it's own? It looks great - perfect for that layered look!

Helen, I did not see the USF specimens, but you should get another one. It will be fun. We can all follow each others' progress with our loropetalum trees. Take pictures if you get one of their specimen trees - I'd like to see it.

Michael, I wonder where you disappeared to? Maybe you are busy gardening. Hope you are ok!

Carol

I am here, just quiet. I pop in a few times a day and see if there is anything worth commenting on. There just hasn't been much this past week that my two cents would bring much value to and so... quiet. Unfortunately my back is giving me fits of pain right now, so my garden activity is limited to strolling around and maybe getting a few weeds.

I almost went looking for a Loropetalum to plant but figured, 1) I don't have room for one and 2) seeing as we are moving in two to three years, I will wait and get one for the new garden.

I also got my seeds for both the Anise Hyssop and the South African Foxglove today, so hopefully I can get out and get a seed tray started tomorrow. If they do well, I will try to collect seed and spread the love a bit.

If that anise hyssop acts anything like it does up here, a little bit will go a long way. Nice plants, some great attributes, but profligate. Or maybe prodigious would be a better word.