What info is on a plant tag? Not enough! Gabe & Rebecca talk about why scientific plant names are good for more than just sounding snobby. And they talk about how they've gone wrong with bachelor's buttons. Learn from their mistakes so you can get this showy blue flower to sparkle in your garden!
What info is on a plant tag? Not enough! Gabe & Rebecca talk about why scientific plant names are good for more than just sounding snobby. And they talk about how they've gone wrong with bachelor's buttons. Learn from their mistakes so you can get this showy blue flower to sparkle in your garden!
Welcome to leafing out. I'm Rebecca. I'm Gabe. And we are not experts. We're amateur gardeners who love to learn about and talk about plants, soil, bugs and everything that happens in a garden. So what are we talking about today? Well, game, let me tell you. Today, you can't be just conversation here. We're talking about plant tags, and bachelors buttons, aka corn flower, aka centaurea cyanus. I think you did a terrific job with that Latin name. Thank you so much. I was really nervous as I was doing it. Sounded perfect. I'm gonna attempt to smooth transition here. So planted, I guess you go to the garden center and you look at a plant tag, the big bold name on there is going to be a common name like basil or daffodil. And yet there's this other category of names of scientific names. Why do they exist? More importantly, why do we keep using them on this podcast? Right? This is a great question. You're at your garden center, or wherever you look at the plant tag. And there's a whole bunch of names and some of them seem really cute and approachable. And some of them seem impenetrable, because they're in botanical Latin. What is all of this information? How are we supposed to sort this out? What does this mean? This is something that I really hesitated to dive into when I got into gardening got interested in it. I was like, Oh, do I really have to look at what the Latin names are? Like, do I have to pay attention to this? This feels like homework. It feels like science class. I did not do very well in biology. And then I started getting confused by the common names. So I was like, Ah, this is why this is why scientific names are a thing. We keep going back and forth. scientific names, botanical Latin names. That's all the same thing. Yeah. When we talk about the scientific name of a plant, we're talking about the botanical Latin name, like akinesia, or for bachelors button centaurea cyanus. So the main thing that I think is useful about botanical Latin names is that they are actually unique to each plant. And common names are not always unique. If you go to a nursery and you say, Hey, I'm looking for bluebells, they might say sure we have blue bells. Yeah, right this way and they show you this plant that is called Okay, I'm going to attempt this highest synthoid is non scriptor. Oh boy. And then it another nursery. You could walk in and say hey, I'm looking for blue bells. And they could show you a totally different plant. They could show you a plant that has the scientific name, Martin sia virginica. These plants are totally different plants, they have different growth habits. They're native to different parts of the world. They're unrelated I should say. It's not just like different varieties of a similar plant. They have nothing to do with each other. They evolved for millennia, independently. Yeah, they're not cousins, or second cousins, different families from different parts of the world. They just have the same common name we throw around the word bluebell, just to apply to anything we kind of think looks like blue and bell shaped sometimes. So if you know the scientific name of the plant you're looking for, you're going to end up with the right plants. You're asking the right question when you say do you have hyacinth oi D is non scripta, which I would be really intimidated to walk into a garden center and say, but also a good way to impress people on all the other plant podcasts that we listen to with gardeners who do this professionally and are far more qualified to talk about this than we are. They always hesitate or ask each other like I say it this way, do you say it that way? We call it botanical lamb. It's not something that people who spoke Latin when Latin was a spoken language would have recognized as Latin it's really like kind of a new language that has been created for plants and animals. And being a primarily written language. I feel like it's not like, Oh, you pronounce that wrong? Like you're a noob. It's more like this is really a written language and you sort of do your best at the pronunciation. That's right. It's primarily a written language. I only know that because I just googled it. Before we move on to the rest of plant tags. I did a little bit of googling deep dive on this and I found so much interesting information. So I'll share a little bit of it. I looked at you'll hear me clicking because I'm clicking around in my millions of open browser tabs right now. Okay, Southern living.com. Amidst its many data sources, yes, I'm citing my sources Southern Living calm in this article about botanical Latin mentions that not only will you not mix up your plant with something else by mentioning it by scientific name, but the Latin names tell you a lot about a plant so they can tell you where a plant is from. For example, you might see canadensis it's from cat it's me to Canada, you might learn the color of the flowers or the foliage, like Alba would mean white, auria, golden, lutea, yellow rubra red, and then it'll give you a little clue as to things like the shape of the plant. So our Boria would be a tree like habit versus compactor would mean dense. I feel like we should also say, it's not like every Latin name has all of this information. It's more like a Latin name would have one. It has a single clue in there. I feel like we should get back. Yeah, back to plants. It's more like I would say a fun thing to know when you when you see a Latin name, and you see Alba and you're like, Oh, that's a white one, you feel really smart. That's right. cornus Alba, you know, that's a dogwood that has white flowers. So you're gonna have your common name, you want to look not just at that big, bold name, but hopefully there is a scientific name on that plant tag, what other information is going to be on your typical plant tag. So you're gonna also see probably, hopefully, the amount of sun that a plant will need, it'll probably say full sun, part, sun, part shade, or full shade. And maybe there's more than one of those categories. So you might have a little icon that indicates part shade to full shade, something like that. And we're going to talk a little more about sun. We talked about bachelors buttons, right? Yeah, we're going to talk about all the ways we have gone wrong with full sun plants and not understanding what what this means, but the plant tag, what else is on there. So sometimes that's it, sometimes it's just the name of the plant, the amount of sun and good luck. Other times, there's a little more information about bloom time and bloom color, it might say like bright fuchsia blooms late spring to early summer, maybe it'll tell you its water needs a little bit. It's like a moist area like so dry area. But plant tags are not going to give you tons of information about the plant. Right, they're small, they're just a little piece of plastic stuck in there. So there's not a ton on there. I admit, I do love nothing more than a good research project. But I would say even for the non research oriented among us, I feel like this is where the scientific name really comes in handy. So you're thinking about buying a plant, or you just picked one up because he thought it looked cool, you've got the scientific name from the bottom of that plant tag, what I like to do is Google the scientific name plus Missouri Botanical Garden, they're sorry, and they're really terrific. There are other resources out there. Depending on where you live, you might have like a State Agricultural school that will have some local information. But the thing about Missouri Botanical Garden is they have a plant finder section of their website that's really comprehensive, I don't think I've ever looked up a plant that hasn't been on there. And they'll tell you how much water plant wants, they'll tell you what soil preferences it has. But by far the most important piece of information, the thing that I always really appreciate that they have on there is where the plant grows in the wild. Because if I have some idea where a plant grows naturally, without people cultivating it, it's much easier for me to figure out what sort of conditions it wants in the backyard. Yeah, that's so true. Why don't you can you say an example? Sure can from our own garden own garden. So we have Rosemary back there, I looked that up. And it says that Rosemary is native to Northern Africa, Southern Europe, in Western Asia, particularly dry rocky areas. So our human wet rely on climate is not that at all. But I can take my rosemary, put it in a pot with really good drainage, maybe add a little sand to the potting soil, put it on the concrete skirt on the south facing wall of our house where it gets super hot in the summer. I know I don't need to fertilize it because it's native rocky soil isn't going to hold a lot of nutrients. And make sure the soil mostly dries out between waterings. And I feel like that's a pretty good approximation of where we growing in nature. Yeah, totally different from where we grow. You know, ferns in the backyard, like the back of our backyard where it's really damp. And we're kind of approximating closer to a you know, damp understory woodland area where you have more rainfall and obviously a ton more shade because ferns, love moist, dark, bottom of the forest floor, really mature trees, think about what's there. And you think like, oh, the leaves are falling every year and a deciduous forest. They create like really rich soil with a ton of organic matter. Lots of nutrients. All right, so plant tags. What's the last word on those? Yeah, when you're at the garden center, the plant tag is going to get you going in the right direction. And if you want to just take the leap from there and stick it somewhere and see how it does, you know that is totally cool. And we won't judge you because the truth is, that's how we've done most of our gardening and that's how you learn. But sometimes if you want to it's it's fun to dig a little deeper and really think about where the plants grow wild. And the last thing I'll say and maybe we'll get into this In another episode, but if you're looking at something like Missouri botanical garden and the entry for a plant, it will tell you when a flower blooms and for how long which you also probably want to think about because if you want something that just explodes in spring and is really beautiful in early spring, you know, that's lovely. On the other hand, if you expect this, this plant that you're buying to bloom from the middle of summer all the way through frost, that's a totally different experience in your garden. So that timing is like another layer to dive into and we'll save it for another episode. Now for a segment called we fucked that up. That's right, bachelors button addition. What do we fuck up? Oh, man. So we got some bachelors button. It's a beautiful wildflower has a super saturated blue flowers is a color that you don't see a lot in nature. A lot of plants that are called Blue are actually more purple air quotes there. Oh, I thought you were talking to me like a cipher podcast. Nope. Just commenting. just telling the people what they quote unquote blue plants are really more purple. But this is blue blue bachelors button is also called corn flour. And if you think about the Crayola pack of crayons and cornflower blue, that is that bright, brilliant blue that the flower is okay. And now I feel like we have to say the scientific name for bachelors button because we do centaurea cyanus. Plant tag said full sun, it said full sun. And we thought well, we have this part of our border garden doesn't have anything shading in and when I stand here in the morning, I see the sun This is full sun, right? Yeah, what could what could be unfill son about this. Fuck that up. Because this is a border garden. It's bordering a fence, there's a fence there. So if you plant something right next to the fence, when you stand there, you might not be in the shade standing next to the fence. But the ground is in the shade until almost noon and full sun to define full what they mean when they say full sun. That's like six plus hours of straight sunlight. parts on our part shade would be four to six hours of sun. Full shade is less than four hours where we stuck this as maybe two feet from an east facing fence. Right offensive runs north south. Yeah, yeah, you could obviously put it against the south wall offense and it would get six plus hours but a north south. Yeah, running fence. Yeah, the result that we got with our bachelors button is instead of getting nice upright stems, what you picture when you picture wild flowers with happy blooms sticking up at the top, what we got was floppy stems that scrape along the ground. And it's blooming but the blooms are like sitting amidst the leaves of the other plants. And it's like sort of pretty, but it looks like something's wrong with it. And we're questioning why is my bachelor's button falling over what's wrong with my bachelor's but and what I learned when I googled it is yeah, bachelors button button is infamous for flopping. If it doesn't get tons and tons and tons of direct sun, this is a wildflower that's meant to be growing in the middle of a field of wild flowers where you're getting 12 hours, 1516 hours of sun sunrise to sundown it's sitting there in the sun. And if it's getting a lot lot less than that it's just gonna lie on the ground and it doesn't have as much energy to hold itself up, right? So what do you do to make sure that you're going to get as much sun as you need on your plants, Rebecca, mess it up over and over and over again and move your plants around a lot. Usually, that sort of thing. I like that approach. I think it's extremely effective. But it takes a lot of patience and you kill some of your plants. I would say if you want to be methodical about it, you can you can take some photos different times a day, see where the light is actually hitting the ground. You can use an app like sun surveyor to see where it's like an augmented reality apps you see where the sun is going to be at different times of the day. And if you love sun surveyor, I do love sun surveyor. You tell everyone you meet about sun survey, I feel like the more I like it, dislike it. It's like we have to meet in the middle. It has to be an even sunspire is not yet sponsoring this podcast, that's some surveyor people. If you're listening it was more or less well it is very effective because you can I will say the biggest thing about some survey and that is certainly not the only app that does it there I'm sure many other apps but you can set the date and see if the sun is going to be behind your tree or behind your fans or behind. whatever other plantings you have, so if it's January and you want to look at like, what's it going to be like in June? What's it going to be like in August, you can, you can plug in those numbers and take a look. But your method of sort of like seeing how stuff does and then moving things around, you get a little more plant specific data. So it's a little more like, you can maybe maybe the bachelors button doesn't do too well there. But I mean, I think akinesia is a full sun plant. We have it planted in among the bachelors but and and that's doing great. That's like blooming and upgrade. And yeah, this is so true. This is why we end up you know, googling ones, like, particular type of plant by the scientific name for hours, because like, does it really want full sun? Or is six hours or five hours enough? every plant is a little bit different. And your exact location and the exact circumstances that you're putting that plan in is unique. This is what I think is kind of so fun about gardening, is you're you're establishing a microclimate where you have this specific type of shade, depending on how many buildings how much wind is protected as your garden protected from by as the building next you wait. So yes, the plant is in shade, but it's getting a ton of reflected light, like that will affect its growth. Yep. I think that's it. Anything else to say about plant tags, pastures button? I think we did it just that if you go to Lowe's or Home Depot, the plant tags suck, and they'll basically lie to you. And you need to Google what that plant actually wants. Because I have been led astray so many times. Yeah, those plant tags are going to be like, it's fine. Don't listen, don't listen to that. This isn't spawn con, this is just like don't go to Home Depot. And Lowe's is like anti anti spawn con. I think the best thing that we've ever done as gardeners is find nurseries that are nurseries and not part of a hardware store and go, you know, maybe you go at an off time or you just develop a relationship where you can actually ask somebody who knows about plants like, Hey, this is what my backyard is like, I want to buy this plan, Will it work? Or is there a different one that's better, whatever. And I think if you go to an independent nursery, you find people who really are interested in talking to you about those questions. And I feel like we've learned so much that way. Oh, my gosh, shout out. Pat comes in little Compton. That's right. Yeah. If you want any recommendations of wonderful Rhode Island based nurseries, you just send us a DM on Instagram and we will tell you where to go because we have the dirt. Like we did it. I think we'll leave it there. See you next time. We hope you've enjoyed leafing out and if you ever have a gardening question that you want us to weigh in on, you can send us an email or better yet, email us a voice memo at leafing out pod@gmail.com and please follow us on Instagram at leafing out pot