Barbara’s Favorite Flowers: Platycodon

Platycodon grandiflorus, is a great hardy perennial for your garden border. Here is why Barbara loves it:

She reproduces and reseeds well, which is always an added bonus (it produces lots of babies to gift your gardening aficionado friend’s with). In the family Campanulaceae (like several of my favorite waterfall and Canterbury bells), but she is the only member of the genus from the Greek meaning broad bells.

A Native of East Asia, she bears big, blue flowers, which start off in lovely swelling buds that for all the world resemble wonderful puffy balloons.

Medicinally, the root of this particular species is used as the base for many age-old natural, and commercially prepared remedies for colds and coughs. You can also use them in salads and soups!

I hope you enjoy this beauty Platycodon as much as I do!

Barbara’s Favorite Flower: Queen Anne’s Lace

Queen Anne’s Lace Daucus carota, a wild carrot, is a wonderful flowering biennial that is native to Europe, but naturalized all over North America. Here is what Barbara has to say about this wild carrot:

Related to carrot (Daucus Carrota) you can eat the root when young, (it tastes and smells like carrot) but it gets nasty and woody as it matures.

Women have used the seeds from Daucus carota for centuries as a contraceptive, the earliest written reference dates back to the late 5th or 4th century B.C. appearing in a work written by Hippocrates. “The seeds, harvested in the fall, are a strong contraceptive if taken orally immediately after coitus.”  I can not speak to the efficiency but it certainly is interesting historically.

Barbara’s Favorite Flowers: Yucca

Yucca is a genus of perennial shrubs and trees in the family Asparagaceae, (asparagus). Yucca, of the agave family, native to the warmer regions of America, has pointed, usually rigid, sword-shaped leaves and clusters of white, waxy flowers. It is also the state flower of New Mexico. They are native to the hot and dry (arid) parts of North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

A cool fact is that Yucca is known in the United States as “ghosts in the graveyard,” as it is commonly found growing in rural graveyards and when in bloom in the twilight or dark, the flowers appear as a glowing apparition floating.

Yuccas have a very specialized, mutualistic pollination system. They are pollinated by yucca moths (family Prodoxidae); the insect purposefully transfers the pollen from the stamens of one plant to the stigma of another, and at the same time lays an egg in the flower; the moth larva then feeds on some of the developing seeds, always leaving enough seed to perpetuate the species.

Medicinally, Yucca is used for osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, migraine headaches, inflammation of the intestine (colitis), high cholesterol, stomach disorders, diabetes, poor circulation, and liver and gallbladder disorders.

This Yucca gets included in the list of “Barbara’s Favorite Flowers” because I like the exotic tropical edge and geometric height it gives to a garden. It’s pretty maintenance free, though I like to remove the lower dead fronds, giving it more of a palm tree shape. My mother always despised the flowers as she does Hosta flowers. She viewed them as secondary to the leaves. I personally love the huge charge of bellflowers you get two to three times a year when not much else is blooming, and the height is great too.