Plant/Gardening Articles

Unpublished

by James E Powell

Surviving Zone Denial: Establishing Exotics in Your Backyard

I've been into plants since I bought a Venus Flytrap out of some little crap catalog that showed up at my parents house a couple of decades ago. I still grow carnivorous plants, but these days I enjoy trying to grow marginally hardy tropical plants in my yard. Hey, that's better than cast iron bathtubs overflowing with petunias! This article, which has not yet been published anywhere else, is the basis for a book proposal I have developed on the same topic (see sample chapter below).

...Zone Denial - version 2

Revised version of Surviving Zone Denial which includes more plants and a new introduction:

"The plant world is filled with anachronisms � plants that cling to forms better suited to another time: fruits meant for seed dispersers long extinct, flowers that pine for pollinators once plentiful. Connie Barlow popularized the idea of anachronistic plant fruits in her book, The Ghosts of Evolution. Its pages are haunted by stories of lost companions � the possibility that pawpaws were meant for mammoths, avocadoes were intended for extinct giant sloths, and ginkgo fruits for dinosaur scavengers. But if a fruit can persist in form and structure for hundreds or even thousands of years or longer, can cold hardiness also lay dormant in bananas, palms, and other tropical herbaceous plants, a memory of colder climes?"

Predatory Pitcher Plants

Here's a survey of the three families of carnivorous pitcher plants. They are all here, including Heliamphora, living fossils from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World to the flower mimics of North America (Sarracenia, Darlingtonia) and Southeast Asia (Nepenthes), and several nearly inexplicable oddities, including one that may have developed an appetite for, well, it resembles a toilet bowl, so you figure it out. By the way, how many of you knew that there were pitcher plants in Minority Report?

Prehistoric Landscapes with Hardy Ancient Gymnosperms (book chapter)

If you are looking to approximate a Mesozoic forest in your backyard, there are some conifers that hang on in remote corners of the world that fit the bill. Although it is hard to believe, there are remote corners of the world that have remained relatively stable for tens of millions of years. In other cases, the slow pace of continental drift ensured that plants had a migration path that would enable them to survive even as their original habitat became wetter, drier, hotter or colder. From the short, stout, palm-like cycads that can sometimes be mistaken for ferns, until they produce giant pine cones and scatter bright orange seeds, to the architectural, minimalist and spiky branches of Auracaria, there are attention grabby prehistoric greenery that can be teased into growing and even thriving in cooler climates.