When it comes to plants, there are two people who I believe every word they say: Felder Rushing and Steve Bender.
For one, neither of them is the least little bit motivated to promote any thing because neither of them sells anything.
Felder does appearances and writes books – his MPB radio show podcast is *the* best; and Steve writes for Southern Living as the Grumpy Gardener (which…once you meet Steve, he really is the Grumpy Gardener. But in a good way. Hi Steve!); still and thankfully, neither of them is selling anything, especially McRoses or ice cube orchids. Thank goodness.
Last week, Steve wrote at his blog about his friend and former Southern Living co-worker, Charlie Thigpen Charlie has a new garden center at Pepper Place in B’ham, so of course I had to visit. It’s called Garden Gallery.
Ideas, ideas, ideas:
We already have our garden in but there was plenty else Charlie had that I would have loved to have brought home – both for the garden and in landscaping plants. I think we’ll be visiting him several more times this summer.
The one thing I did get on this visit was a Bhut Jolokia anti-terrorist (really!) pepper plant: it’s the hottest pepper on earth (over one million on the Scoville scale). It is going in a container far behind our retaining wall so there’s no way anyone but Av can get to it; once it starts producing I’d like to take one zillionth of an ounce and make some hot pepper jelly…we’ll see…
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A couple of interesting garden pics from other people:
Image by mikecogh used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic – thank you!
My beautiful, creative friend Cindy in Oklahoma came up with the idea of making old purses into planters by poking holes through the bottom for drainage:
That goes for some people and their shoes too.
And this: yes, yes, yes.