My first year growing Dahlias. What took me so long!?

It’s a challenge to find plants that look tropical and grow in New York, but Dahlias make it easy

4 months ago these plants were just dormant roots sitting in ziplock bags filled with soil on my windowsill. Now they’re my favorite plant!

This is my first year growing Dahlias. For some reason, I always thought of them as an “old fashioned” formal flower, but I was totally wrong! They compliment tropical foliage beautifully.

I wasn't sure if the Dahlias would work out so I planted Zinnias from seed alongside them. It turns out they work well together!

Best of all you can dig them up in Autumn and store them in the garage. They’ll just get bigger and better the following year!

Here's a bonus photo: My "Rising Moon" lily. Just an amazing plant that will come back year after year. It can get up to 6 feet allegedly!

 

The best Variegated Ginger for your northern yard.

Variegated plants are ALL the rage and gigner might be my favorite way to bring those happy white splotches into the garden. Did you know there are dozens of different types?  

The most popular, Variegated Shell Ginger, Alpinia zerumbet, is actually not the easiest for us northern gardeners. They do fantastic as summer annuals, but they don't have strong rhizomes so they have to stay alive in the winter as indoor houseplants. They can usually stick it out if you have a warm garage though and are definitely worth planting. Mine looks great next to my pond. 

My personal favorite is Zingiber mioga. It is a reliable perennial here in zone 7 and can actually survive in zone 6. It does not have showy blooms but is a great choice in part shade. Unfortunately, mine did eventually die because it got too much shade. It had a great run though. Here's a photo from 2019.

Hedychium is an incredible genus of gingers for northern Gardeners. You can treat them like cannas, except with fragrant blooms that appear much later in the season. Some cultivars are actually variegated like "Vanilla Ice". I dig the rhizomes up in Autumn. It blooms in September and October at about 3 to 4 feet tall.

june 1

Variegated Spiral Ginger is a really fun one to grow. It a little more complicated, but does have a strong rhizome and is so pretty! 

Back from the DEAD, an update on Cordyline Australis and Hedychium Gingers after 3F last winter.

Hedycium gingers are not a reliable perennial for me in my yard. They do much better in a southern zone 7 where the ground doesn't freeze as deeply so I usually dig them up and bring them in the garage. This year all the rhizomes I left outside came back with a vengeance.

The overnight low in my garden was 3F. It was the coldest night in nearly a decade, but it was otherwise an incredibly mild winter so the ground never got very cold. The tropical perennials never felt the true blast of winter and they came up beautifully! 

For new gardeners, here's a little breakdown on USDA zones.

The USDA zones are an incredible general guide for gardeners deciding what to plant in their landscapes. They define how cold the coldest night of the year is. My backyard is in a zone 7, but we're more limited than the zone 7 climates in the southeast because the winter sun angle is lower and the daytime high temperatures are much colder. 

Hedychium coronarium (butterfly ginger) growing beautifully in a pot with Tradescanthia sillamontana after overwintering in the garage. I've been growing them like this for a decade now.

May 17

I was not expecting the rhizomes I left in the ground to come back. They were planted very shallow. 

June 1

This was my first year growing Hedychium Daniel Weeks in the ground. It's coming up beautifully. 

May 29

June 18

"Daniel Weeks" is an exciting ginger for northern gardeners. Not only has it proven to be cold tolerant without mulch for me, but it's also an early bloomer. Gingers typically bloom in late summer and early Autumn - rarely reaching their fullest potential before frost knocks them for the year. Daniel Weeks starts blooming in August!

That's not to say you won't get beautiful blooms up here from other Hedychiums. "Vanilla Ice" blooms from September to Frost and has beautiful white specks on its foliage all season. It's a stunner! 

October 27

Tropical Perennials that come back year after year in New York zone 7.

Tropical plants can't get enough warm and humid days, which is why they often don't look their best this early in the season. With summer just about to officially begin, my tropical perennials are showing so much promise. 

Calla Lily

Last year I decided to try Calla lilies for the first time. It was a huge success! Pictured here is 'My Swartberg Giant'. I purchased it as a small plant from Plant Delights 3 years ago. This is the first time it's bloomed. The white callas contrast beautifully with the dark foliage of Canna musifolia var. rubrum. This canna variety also came back without any additional protection other than being planted close to the house. 

It turns out I'm not the only person with luck growing Calla lilies in the ground on Long Island. Here's a photo from a gardener's yard who lives down the block. I believe this variety is "White Giant". The owner say their calla lily is over a decade old.

I planted another calla by the pond. I love how even a single flower can make such a statement. It's not a very frequent bloomer, but the flowers last a long time and come earlier than canna blooms. 

Unfortunately, the Alphina Ginger next to it is not as simple to keep happy over the wintertime. It's either a summer annual or a houseplant 6 months out of the year.

I bought my Musa Sikkimensis "Bengal Tiger" as a seedling last summer. Years ago, banana plant lovers were hoping that Musa Sikkimensis would be as cold-tolerant as Musa Basjoo. That's not the case, but it is definitely the most cold-tolerant variegated banana. 

I haven't tried overwintering Musa Sikkimensis in the ground just yet. If it gets some size, I might experiment this year. It has a long way to go before it catches up to my Musa "Viente Cohol". This more tropical fruiting banana is dug up in Autumn and overwinters in my kitchen.

"Viente Cohol" like most bananas require a lot of heat to start growing leaves. It didn't get it's first outdoor leaf until late May. Now it looks like it'll start growing at a rate of about a new leaf every 2 weeks. If your summers are frustratingly cool, I recommend the Ensete Maurelli below.

My Ensete Maurelli overwintered in the garage where temperatures regularly dropped to 30F over the winter. Despite that, it started to grow in March. High temperatures were only in the 50s. 

As you can see in the photo above, it's grown so much in the past 10 weeks. Here's a photo 3 months ago in March. 

Yucca gloriosa is an awesome agave look-alike that handles our winters so well on Long Island. It's native to the eastern United States, but the variegated form has such an exotic look.

Thanks for looking!

Tropical plants are finally waking up!

Growing tropical plants up north takes a lot of patience. We love tropicals because they grow so quickly, but they are usually very slow to wake up. The garden really doesn't fill out until late June! 

You can see the Plumerias are still totally leafless as of late May. I love these plants because the blooms emerge with the first leaves so you get to enjoy these plants in their full glory by mid-summer (blooms and all!)

The cannas and star jasmine on the trellis survived the winter. I planted my Musa Viente Cohol and Musa Bengal Tiger in this spot along with Dahlia, Ginger, Zinnia, and Colocasia. 

These cannas at my parent's house (robert kemp) also survived the winter. They have been in the ground for a long time now and get bigger each year!

I store my hedychium ginger in the garage. The tradescantia sillamontana vines also survive the winter in the garage. It trails beautifully in planters and brings gorgeous blue flowers all summer long! 

Growing Itoh Peonies from Home Depot - Will they bloom in their first year?

As much as I try to emulate southern gardens up here in New York, there's one northern plant that grows beautifully up here, much to the envy of southern gardeners - peonies. Peonies bloom for just a few weeks out of the year and come in 2 different growth habits, tree peonies & herbaceous. 

But I'm a rule breaker, so when I saw these Itoh Penoy roots at Home Depot I had to get them. You see, Itoh peonies - also known as intersectional peonies, are a hybrid of the tree and herbaceous species. Tree peonies don't die back in the winter and grow to a much larger size. Herbaceous peonies die to the ground and are a great choice for smaller gardens, but don't have the flower power that tree peonies have because they only bloom on the top of stalks. These hybrid peonies take the best of both parents - allegedly giving a month of plentiful flowers on a relatively tiny shrub. It should be fun! 

Mid March 

Here's what the roots look like right out of the packaging. I'm pretty excited to see multiple shoots already starting to grow out. I've been told not to expect these to bloom in the first few years, so I'm keeping my expectations low and hoping for a nice surprise in a few weeks! 

Under my Crape Myrtle, I planted a Bartzella Peony

Next to the Air Conditioner unit, I planted a Cora Louise Peony and a Hawaii Coral Peony (Hawaii Coral is  herbaceous, not intersectional)

Spring Update!

Here we are in the first week of June! The Bartzella Peony was the only one to bloom. It's just a single flower, but it was worth the wait!

June 3

June 5

 The other two peonies had very weak growth. We'll see if 2024 is their year!