One of the prettier weeds that grow in my yard is purslane. Chances are, no matter where you live in the world, you probably have some form of purslane growing in your yard. The stuff will grow in just about any condition on the planet. Actually, I think there was rumours that Neil Armstrong found some on the moon as well.

All in all, purslane is not an unattractive plant. It makes a very nice ground cover if you are feeling particularly lazy. As a matter of fact, its matting nature will actually block many other weeds from growing, if you allow it to spread out and unbutton its pants.

On top of that, it is an uber nutritious plant. It is better for you than most of the plants you grow in your garden and it is a tasty plant besides that.

As a general rule, it doesn’t matter how pretty, helpful or nutritious a plant is. Being the masochistic bunch that we are, if a plant does not make us suffer in some way, than it is just not worthy of being included in our garden. And so, purslane is considered to be a weed.

I have to admit, that up until this past year, I did not know much about the lowly purslane. It was a weed. An easy to eradicate weed, with rather shallow roots and a spreading structure that meant one pulled up cleared good foot, but a simple weed nonetheless.

Then I started to hear people extol on the nutritional and culinary uses for purslane. This stuff is a super plant. If there was a nuclear catastrophe, all you would have left would be cockroaches and purslane. Cut off he stem, the stem will still produce seeds. The seeds can remain viable for 30 years.

Purslane is super healthy, too. It is packed with omega-3 fatty acids. A whole cup of it contains a mere 7 calories. One cup will also you provide you with 11% of your daily requirement of vitamin A and 15% of vitamin C. It has lots of other healthy nutrients as well. Low carb, no fat or cholesterol. It is healthier than spinach and is a dieter’s dream.

If you are eating purslane, you are in good company. Gandhi considered it one of his most favorite foods. It is also purported to help arthritis and circulatory problems.

How could you go wrong?

While this is not a cooking blog, I have a great recipe to get you started eating and most people will have almost everything they need for this recipe from their garden by mid August.

Zucchini, Purslane And Tomato Salad

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 crushed garlic cloves
1/4 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil plus additional for brushing zucchini
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano
4 zucchini halved lengthwise
3 cups chopped purslane, thick stems removed
1 ½ cups diced tomato (or halved cherry tomatoes)

Make dressing: Whisk together zest, lemon juice, shallot, mustard, and salt in a small bowl. Add oil in a slow stream, whisking until dressing is emulsified. Whisk in pepper and parsley.

Mix Salad: Lightly brush zucchini all over with oil. Grill or cook zucchini, cut sides down first, uncovered, turning once, until zucchini are just tender, 8 to 12 minutes total. Remove from heat, cool slightly, then cut into chunks.

Toss zucchini with purslane, tomatoes, and dressing in a large bowl. Serve immediately.

So give it a try. I mean after all, if you just spent a good part of your time pulling the damn things out of your garden, you might as well make use of them.

That will be the one ball in the side bed pocket and the eight ball in the corner pocket for the game. Rack ‘em up, and let’s play again.

I can not resist a novelty plant. I really, really can’t. You give me a bizarre story or just a bizarre looking plant and my wallet is in my hand before you can say “Master Card or Visa”. To be perfectly honest, most of the time, novelty plants don’t live up to the promise. They are the plant industry’s equivalent to those little ads you see in the back of magazines that promise to teach you to hypnotize women for your own entirely unethical reasons or send you directions for your very own hovercraft (batteries and materials and physics not included).

But, despite this firm knowledge, when I saw the “One Ball Squash” and the “Eight Ball Squash” in the Park Seed catalog, I was sold. Maybe this time it would work. Maybe this time, they would be really cool.

Now, I have preface this story with the fact that I seem to have a vine borer resort in my backyard. I swear, it is the equivalent of a vine borer Disneyland. I plant a squash type plant, vine borers buy plane tickets to visit the magical land of Hanna’s Garden. I guess what I am trying to say is that historically, squash plants don’t last too long in my garden.

But I am a big fan of zucchinis. I grew up feasting on a great many baseball bat size zucchinis. (Then I started watching the Food Channel and I learned that zucchinis aren’t really suppose to get that big. *shrug* Live and learn.) I still love zucchini

Anyhoo, I ALWAYS try to grow zucchini but the whole vine borer situation interferes and I end up trading tomatoes for other gardeners zucchini. This is a badge of shame for a gardener, seeing how everyone else is bitching about what to do with too many zucchinis.

So, back to the main point. I bought them and figured that they would follow all the rest and die a slow, brown, painful (for me) death. And I must say, I have been pleasantly surprised. I don’t know if they opened the vine borer equivalent to Epcot or if I just got lucky, but my pool ball squash have done amazingly well.

All plants are healthy and lush and producing like champs. I think I will soon have so many growing that I may even have the ability to trade my novelty squash on the gardener black vegetable market.

Don’t know if they are a better variety or what, but for right now, the One Ball and Eight Ball Squash are going on my growing next year list.

When I was offered this pretty little plant, I thought, “Aw, it is so cute.” Little white flags waving over a sea of green. Little did I realize that those flags were actually white flags of surrender from the other plants in the garden. “Help, us. Help, Us. It is taking over.”

There is no denying that Gooseneck Loosestrife is a stunning plant. When grown in drifts, it can bring life to a mid and late summer garden. The trade-off is that it will strangle the life from a year round garden, if not kept in check.

And keeping this plant in check is no small task. It spreads by bright red underground runners. The runners will run where ever the soil will let them. I have seen this plant double its footprint in a year, every year.

I now rip it out of the ground when it steps out of line. You have to be strict with these kinds of plants. Give them an inch and they will take the whole yard, and I mean that quite literally.

The nice thing about Gooseneck Loosestrife is that it will grow where ever you need it to. Sun, shade, wet, dry. It is a happy little bully plant no matter where you put it.

The only downside to this plant (besides the whole invasive species thing) is that it may need a little support. I find that without some kind of support system (like you would use with dahlias and peonies) you end up with a whole bunch of pretty flowers eating dirt.

When someone says “drought tolerant”, they are talk about a plant that can grow with very little water. But when you are talking about Blanket Flowers, what you should say is “desert tolerant”. I honestly am not sure these plants need water.

The flower pictured to the right is the descendant of a North Carolina Souvenir. I make it a point to bring back a plant from every pace that I visit. On a trip to North Carolina with family several years ago, we stayed in a beach house in Nag’s Head, North Carolina. The beach outside the house had only one kind of plant growing in it, and that was hundreds of Blanket Flowers or Gaillardia. The sand was of the fine, fine kind. Lovely for beaches, not so great for plants and yet these tenacious plants survived.

I scooped up one, plopped it in a used plastic beer cup (I have that kind of family) and held it in my lap all the way home. I gingerly planted it in the driest bed I have and it rewarded me by abandoning the bed a year after I planted it. Apparently, it preferred to grow in the cracks in the sidewalk next to the bed, because that is now the ONLY place in my garden I can get it to grow.

Massive, 2 – 3 foot tall plants grow from 1/4 cracks. TLC is apparently the last thing this plant needs. It just wants to be kicked to the curb and abused. I think that there is a psychological condition that addresses this mindset, but I am not a plant shrink, so I don’t know what to call it.

Blanket Flowers were named for an amateur botanist who happened to have alot of money to give to professional botanists (note to Bill Gates, Paris Hilton or any of the Princes of Saudi Arabia, if you give me money, I promise to find you a plant to name after you). As a result of financial contributions, Frederick Pursh named this plant after M.Gaillard de Charentonneau in the botanical book, Flora Americae Septentrionalis. Many of the plants that were in this book were discovered during the explorations of Lewis & Clark, which is the case with the Blanket Flower. Found in Montana by that famous party, it now grows wild in many part of the US and beyond.

The common name of Blanket Flower comes from the fact that they were colored much like the brightly woven blankets of the Native Americans who lived in the area where the plant was first found.

Pretty flower, doesn’t need my help to grow and yet does not feel the need to bully my other plants. While this may be a loner plant and it may grow in inconvenient locations (good thing the kids have learned that plants come before convenience), it is one plant I am glad has decided to join my garden party in a rebel, you suck but I’ll hang sort of way.

If there is one thing I have learned over the years is that gardeners in general really need to take a few Public Relations classes before they go giving plants common names. Toad Lily? Lungwort? Butterfly Weed? Who thinks these names would encourage people to put these plants in their garden?

I think at the very least the the nursery industry should get involved and petition or something. These sorts of naming conventions are hurting their business.

Anyhoo, I think creeping phlox is one of these poorly named plants. Creeping? Scary monsters creep. Bad guys creep. Pretty flowering groundcovers do not creep. OK, it does creep but not in creepy, out to kill you sort of way.

Creeping phlox is actually a native Eastern US plant but it will grow just about anywhere in the United States. It will grow happily from zone 3-9 and is recommended for all kinds of gardening types from shade gardening to xeriscaping. Needless to say, creeping phlox is one hardy plant.

One of the best loved features about creeping phlox is that it will spread, but is not so brutish as to be invasive about it. It will cover an area quite nicely and will politely step around anything already growing there.

One bonus I have found with creeping phlox is that it makes an ideal groundcover to mix with bulb plantings. The cheeping phlox creates a cover that is solid to the eye but not matted to the ground. Because of this, bulbs can come up very nicely through the phlox, look magnificent and then, just about the time their blooms fade, the phlox comes to its full glory, which helps detract from the bulb’s greenery sticking out above. Then for the rest of the year the creeping phlox serves as a nice backdrop to the rest of the garden.

Apparently, I am not the only one who thinks that creeping phlox is a poor name for such a lovely plant. In some areas, creeping phlox is referred to as “moss pink”, though I would like to point out that it is neither moss nor always pink.

We are coming to the end of the tulip season. Late blooming tulips seem to be the only thing that saves the garden, which is stuck between spring and summer flowers, from being nothing but a sea of lush greens.

Previously, I was not a big fan of tulips but, as I get older and I pay more attention to what my garden looks like as a whole rather than the parts and pieces I fall in love with in the nursery and shove into open spots when I get home, I have found they serve an important purpose in the garden. Tulips were just so… well… every garden. Everyone grows them and they are a pain since they tend to die off after a few years. But right now, they are all that is giving color to my garden until the early summer riot starts.

Legend has it that tulips are the cradles of fairy babies. At night, fairy grandmothers steal into gardens that are filled with tulips and rock their little grandbabes to sleep. And I can believe this because if you have ever looked into a tulip, the pollen does look suspiciously like baby poop.

Supposedly, if you never pick your tulips, the fairies will bless you with a beautiful garden. I am personally screwed in this area. While I never pick my tulips, the deer do seem to think that they are a tasty snack. Only about 50% of the tulip blossoms in my yard make it past two days of being open. I just hope that the fairies have the good sense to keep their babies out of my tulips. I would hate for my tulips to be contributing to any fairy baby deaths. Though if they are, this gives me just one more reason to get my deer hunting license this fall.

The name tulip is actually a bastardization of the word “Turban”. Tulips originate from Asia and made their way to Europe through trading routes in Turkey. While most people associate tulips with Holland and the Dutch, the fact is that they were VERY late in coming into the tulip obsession game. Turkish nobility valued tulip bulbs over the lives of the Turkish people. One could be exiled, even put to death for taking a tulip bulb out of the capital.

Even with these strict laws, tulips eventually made it to Holland. Because the flower looks much like that headgear worn by Turkish men, European people started to call these very expensive flowers “turbans”. Eventually, through telephone game semantics, this became “tulipans” which was then shortened to “tulip”.

My, my, my… how far the mighty tulip has fallen. Where once they were treasured above human life and could make or break a vast fortune, they are now sold at your local big box store for $9.95 for a dozen.

I suppose it doesn’t matter if they are cradles for fairytale creatures or worth their weight in gold, I just need to plant more so that next year, I have a bit more color in my garden at this time of year.

L’Chayim! (Sorry, didn’t mean to spit in the screen.) It is time to harvest the horseradish. Do you know how I know that? Because it is almost Passover.

Horseradish is one of the things that is traditionally served in the Passover Seder. It serves the purpose of Maror or the bitter herb which represents the bitterness of the Jews slavery in Egypt.

But I am not Jewish, so why do I care that it is almost Passover. Well, first because I like to be a culturally aware and sensitive gal, at least as much as one can be when one has been brought up in the Midwest.

Second, because the date of Passover (where they eat horseradish) normally falls around the time that is good to harvest horseradish. It’s that whole circle of life… or something. Anyway, horseradish should be harvested in early Spring and the date of Passover reminds me that it is time to harvest.

I headed out to the horseradish tub to harvest this year’s crop. Yes, I said tub. I buried a big plastic tub in the ground before I planted my horseradish. Horseradish is invasive and near impossible to kill once it is established. So unless you want to have a horseradish garden, you have to treat the stuff like mint. Tasty but dangerous.

I dug up a few roots and left others to grow for next year. To tell the truth, I could have dug up all the roots and it still would have come back for next year, but I don’t need that much horseradish.

I then used a blender to process my horseradish. Just a note, fresh horseradish needs to be processed with the windows open. Holy goodness and mercy on us all, this stuff is potent. The zing of horseradish comes from a chemical called allyl isothiocyanate which is produced when the chemicals sinigrin & myrosin combine in water. Horseradish has sinigrin and horseradish has myrosin, but it doesn’t keep them in the same place so the heat and hop does not exist until you chop the root up.

To any Jews who may be passing through, happy Passover. May the reflection on your history show you the blessings of your life.

She has a daffodil beauty, but in repose her face is strangely tragic…
-Edith Sitwell about Marilyn Monroe

I have a confession to make. I have always had a school girl crush on Marilyn Monroe. Who wouldn’t, after all? She had grace, poise and tragedy.

We love a good tragedy, which explains our fascination with Britney Spears. But what Britney accomplishes through bumbling, Marylin simply embodied. She was the spirit of American tragedy.

Her’s is a legend of tragedy, which is why it is not surprising that a poet once compared her beauty to that of the golden trumpet of spring known as the daffodil. Daffodils are beautiful flowers, but they are as equally tragic as dear Marylin.

The ancient Greeks thought their nodding flowers were mournful and that they were an omen of death. They also thought the yellow flower grew throughout the land of the Underworld. The Greeks were not the only ones to associate them with death. The Egyptians and Medieval Europe did as well.

The myth of the daffodil says that they are the living essence of a young man who fell in love with his own reflection and died pining away for it. It is uncertain if the tragedy here lies in the fact that he missed his chance at true love in the nymph name Echo or in the fact that he mistook himself for a woman or that Echo didn’t just slap him upside the head and tell him to get over himself.

Greek myth also states that Persephone was imprisoned by Hades after he captured her while she was picking daffodils.

The daffodils botanical name is Narcissus, which shares the same root as narcotic. The bulbs contain a paralyzing poison. Roman soldiers reputedly carried them into battle and if they were badly injured, they would consume them so that they might die painlessly.

Daffodils are also doomed to destroy those around it. Put a single cut daffodil in a vase with other flower and in morning you will wake to a bunch of dead flowers with one live daffodil trying not to look suspicious.

Beautiful and tragic, a deadly combination that we can’t help falling in love with, whether it be a flower or a woman.

It seems to me that as soon as a flower proves that it has no problem surviving in a particular climate, someone slaps the label “wildflower”. To we snobbish gardeners, being a wildflower is like being the trailer park beauty queen. All the boys want her number but nobody is taking her to the party. Such is the case with the marsh marigold.

The marsh marigold, or cowslip as it’s known to its close friends, is a wildflower. Technically, as the name would imply, marsh marigolds grow in marshy areas. Most descriptions of it would imply that they will only grow in consistently wet and shady areas, but from personal experience, I can honesty state these things will grow anywhere except severe drought.

It grows beautifully all over my yard and my neighbor’s yard (which is where I snitched them from to begin with). It grows best where the ground is consistently wet and the light is shady, but there are many areas where it only gets marsh like conditions for a few weeks per year. The rest of the year, the conditions are dry with normal rainfall providing the water. As a matter of fact, my neighbor has theirs up on a mound that could not possibly stay wet all year.

Marsh marigolds bloom in early spring and are done blooming by late spring. After that, their dark green, ruffled heart shaped leaves make a great ground cover for the remainder of the year. From what I can tell, they are evergreen. So even in the winter months, they add a nice green color to an otherwise drab winter.

The flowers are yellow and are family to buttercups. It has knock-off petals that look like the petals you would pay big bucks for but in fact they are really petaloid sepals.

Best of all, when the rest of the garden is still trying to decide if it is safe to come out yet, marsh marigolds are dotting the world with little yellow spots of sunshine.

The real problem is that they are easy. Easy flowers just don’t get the respect that they should. The gardeners all talk about how great those wildflowers are but your big box nursery just would not approve of that kind of “wildflower” relationship.

I never rely on snowdrops to tell me when spring has arrived. Now, it is not to say that I am knocking the more commonly used snowdrop, it is just that I have, for my garden, an earlier indicator that winter has been asked to leave the building. It is my dutch iris.

While the snowdrops are still frightened little fists afraid that winter will come back for round two, my dutch iris never fail to unfold brilliantly and tell that blustery bully just where he can stick it.

Dutch iris can be considered the bastard offspring of European royalty. A hybrid of Spanish Iris, these spunky children bloom earlier than their more cautious matriarchs. Unfortunately, they seem to have inherited family tendency to bloom and run. While their blooms are lovely to behold, they are short lived. They last no more than a week or two.

But that is not to say that they die then. Like many bulbs, their foliage will continue to live and store energy. But, unlike other bulbs, their foliage will continue to grow after the bloom dies. They are about six inches tall when they bloom and when their foliage finally dies back, they will be close to two feet tall.

Every year, I look forward to these beauties and every year I say I must plant more. But of course, when the time comes for planting them in the fall, I have long forgotten the small service they gave me so many months ago. But, here and now, I will make note of again. Perhaps this year I will remember that the sorrow I feel at the end of the summer pales in comparison to the joy I feel at the beginning of spring and the coinciding sight of the dutch iris’ airy blossoms.