Making It Grow Minutes

It's hard to harvest at home.

Twenty some odd years ago, Edward and I dug up a hickory seedling on his family’s farm. The foot tall seedling had a six-foot long tap root that fortunately took a turn and didn’t go straight down. We brought it home and heeled it in near the house.

One of the most beautiful of fall trees is the hickory. With leaves the color of slightly browned butter it is quite a standout.

Magnolia grandiflora, our southern magnolia with large, glossy leaves is part of many nature-based decorations for holidays and special occasions.

The relatively modest Christmas decorations at Historic Columbia’s Robert Mills House reflect what would have been accurate during the 1820’s.

Our dear departed friend Extension agent Tony Melton grew up on the sandy soils of McBee. Although those soils grow great peaches, they did not produce plentiful crops. Tony said Christmas was special for his family but, with eight children, presents were minimal.

The holiday decorations at Colonial Williamsburg are knock your socks off beautiful, but not historically accurate. Christmas decorations weren’t a big deal during those early times and citrus and pineapples would have been prohibitively expensive.

Christmas morning was a magical time for the three McNulty kids who lived on Woodleigh Road in Columbia.

At the South Carolina Botanical Garden, the goal is not just to offer visitors a rich experience in seeing a wide panoply of native and introduced plants that grow in three hundred acres which duplicate ecosystems from across the state, but they also preserve and protect endangered plants.

Recently we filmed a segment about so called carnivorous plants with Trent Miller, manager of the Natural Heritage Gardens at the South Carolina Botanical Gardens at Clemson.

Recently, we went to the South Carolina Botanical Garden to film their newest project – the Birding Garden. The people who take up birding are dedicated and persistent, the garden staff noticed that every morning binocular-laden folks were gathering in a particular place below the Visitor’s Center, scanning the tree line for views of year-round or migratory avians.

Our small state has wildly divergent plant communities and the Botanical Garden’s topography and soil types allows many of these to be replicated. At the garden, experts in ecology, conservation, botany, woody and herbaceous plants teach core classes.

The South Carolina Botanical Garden is on the Clemson campus but since 1992 has been designated as the State Botanical Garden.

At a home in Saint Matthews, dating from 1880, the yard is now naturalized. But in the fall, you can see where the formal beds from probably a century ago were the planted. Almost overnight, usually after a good, drenching rain, twelve to fifteen inch tall brilliant red spider lilies, Lycoris radiata, pop up and continue blooming for almost a month.

I don’t think the person who gave the common name Hurricane Lily to what I’ve always called spider lilies, Lycoris radiata, meant to cast aspersions on them.

Spider lilies are one of my favorite garden flowers for arrangements.

Another Lycoris species often found in older gardens has a wonderfully amusing common name – Naked Lady Lily, Lycoris squamigera

If you are plagued by deer, there are two groups of bulbs made to order for your yard.

Bitter sneezeweed is a wide spread native plant — and staying with sneezing, there are lots of ideas about that.

Bitter sneezeweed was used as a type of dry snuff by some native populations to induce sneezing to drive out evil spirits or help clear head colds.

The side of the road flowers are making me pay more attention to soil types as I drive from St. Matthews to Sumter.

If you want a wildflower area in a place you can’t water, some of these sneezeweed cultivars would be perfect to use.

Like Rodney Dangerfield, some wildflowers can’t get a break.

Some native Crotalarias are the original larval food source for the ornate bella moth.

Amanda McNulty discusses crotalaria spectabilis, a yellow flower commonly known as rattlebox.