More NCBG Good Stuff

*All photos in this post were taken at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill in April 2010*

This picture makes me miss the 'May Breeze' Woodland Phlox that I got in a trade and lost in one of those droughts we've been having every summer. Time to try it again. ;) The pale blue/ white makes a fabulous combination with the other blues and lavenders. The Garden sometimes offers P. divaricata seeds on its annual seed list and sells plants on-site too.

I've tried and failed with Pitcher Plant and plan to try again. They were easy to start from seed and I put them where the water drains from the house roof, but the dirt was probably too heavy, or they dried out at some point. Pitcher Plants like peat bogs, which are wet, acidic, and nutrient-poor.

The chartreuse blooms belong to the Yellow Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia flava)
and among the species with the wine-colored blooms are Purple Pitcher
Plant (Sarracenia purpurea) and Sweet Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia rubra).

Rob Gardner, who brought us Baptisia 'Purple Smoke' and Baptisia 'Carolina Moonlight', also developed several Sarracenia hybrids.

If you're going to have a carnivorous plant display you've got to have a bug sculpture! I have had random thoughts of designing a garden sculpture, buying the materials and asking my FIL, who was a welder by trade, to build it, but it's probably not in the cards. He's 65, had a knee replacement that didn't go well and forced him to retire early, and asking him to do something like that would probably be too much.

Meadow beauty, orchids, Sabatia, and few-flowered milkweed also grow in these beds and bloom in summer. Few-flowered milkweed has been offered on the seed list before and if it's offered again I'm definitely going to choose it! The color of the flowers is out of this world. Normally I don't like red-orange, except for Turk's Cap and Carolina Lilies, but these flowers positively glow. It's a tall and graceful milkweed.

Wild Sabatia grows on our farm. I am not sure of the species, although the flowers are smaller than the one on display in the Garden. Here Sabatia forms sweetly fragrant miniature pink bouquets in sunny wet places in June, in the ditches along the grass road that runs between the pastures and down to the creek. If you have a pond or bog garden and live in zone 7 or south, I definitely recommend this genus.

I have not seen any wild Pawpaws on the farm, as we are probably too far east, but I have grown a couple from seed from the Garden. One is about 5' tall now. It needs more buddies. It hasn't bloomed yet, but there is a good-sized Pawpaw at the Garden that blooms and fruits every year.

It has a beautiful Dutchman's Pipe climbing up through it, which I've seen in bloom before and the flowers are absolutely charming.

The Garden offered the seeds of Cumberland azalea this year but I took a pass on it, although it's a beautiful azalea, with vivid red-orange flowers in the middle of summer. I probably should have tried them but growing azaleas from seed takes patience, patience, and more patience. I wish they would someday offer the seeds of the Florida azalea that grows by the Totten Center.

There are some big beautiful Fla azalea specimens in the mountain section, with bright orange flowers, much like the ones I have only a little brighter, and they are gorgeous.

The one by the Totten Center is unusual though. The buds are reminiscent of a
Flame Azalea, a swirl of pink, cream and gold, but very very sweetly fragrant.

Eventually the flowers fade to cream while hanging on to their fragrance. The
effect may look a little anemic in the photo but in person it's definitely not.

This isn't the end of my wants from the Garden, not by a long shot. ;) We're lucky to have a resource like this within an hour's drive.