Category: Plants
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Spilling the Beans…
It took three summers to determine which kind of beans or peas will really work for us in this mediterranean garden. What works for me: Asparagus Beans / Vigna unguiculata sesquipedalis A definite keeper! From early July through late September I can harvest handfuls of long green, tasty and tender beans. They are also popular…
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Ipomoea
No garden without the large luminous flowers of Ipomoea purpurea “Heavenly Blue” or “Grandpa Ott” – my favorite color varieties in my previous gardens. But it turns out to be just too hot and dry for them here. I did try sowing them but if they come up at all they need to be watered daily…
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Trees for a Dry Mediterranean Garden
When we re-did our garden layout in the winter of 2023/2024, the goal was to turn the wide open vegetable and flower garden, where everything burned up in the summer, into a “park garden” with lots of shade trees. I researched a lot and made up a nice little shortlist of more or less drought-tolerant…
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Vitex agnus-castus latifolia
Vitex agnus-castus is a native of the Mediterranean region, known since antiquity and always believed to be an anaphrodisiac (“chaste tree”), although this has never been scientifically proven. It is widely cultivated in warm, temperate regions, loves full sun, a well-draining, loamy, neutral to alcaline soil, and is hardy to −15 °C as well as pretty…
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Nerium oleander
Oleander is one of those plants that seems to grow in every Mediterranean garden and is also seen all along highways, roadsides, and public spaces in southern France. It is native or naturalized in many warm regions from northwest Africa and the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, the Arabian Peninsula, southern Asia and even southern…
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Verbascum
Verbascum is a family of over 400 different species of flowering plants, commonly called mullein, some of which are used in herbal medicine. Verbascum species are native to Eurasia with the Mediterranean being the home of the largest number of varieties. But despite this and despite Verbascum being well-suited for dry and chalky soils, I’ve…