Dr. Allan Armitage
I was lucky enough to hear Dr. Allan Armitge speak last week. Dr. Armitage is a well-known author and researcher specializing in horticulture. His texts are routinely used in college classrooms.
During the talk, Dr. Armitage referred to one of his books as “the bible” on herbaceous plants. And actually, it is. He conducts his research and teaches at the University of Georgia.
So I was really interested to hear which new and native plants he recommends. He offered a list of more than 60 good plants. His recommendations are valuable because he has grown the plants in trial gardens and is so well studied in Horticulture that his opinions on the vitality and attractiveness of plants are second to none.
Rather than just listing them here, I thought it would be fun to tweet about them and interject a quote or two from the talk. I’ll give it a try, and I’ll shoot for tweeting three plants a day. If you find this really boring, let me know! I’ll use #armitage in the tweets so you can search for them. If you don’t follow me on twitter, three a day will be displayed here. Hope you find it fun.
Most of the plants I tweet about will be available at local garden centers or native plant nurseries in the spring. If I find a plant that will not be sold locally, I will find a mail order source and post it here. Thanks for playing.
4 Comments
Wow. Laura! What a terrific idea….you can count on my RTs.
I’ve been following your tweets on this. Glad to see he is recommending natives, I have some of his books from way back. Thanks for posting!
Thank you! He was speaking specifically on natives for most of the morning. And he did say, he thinks we garden a lot with native plants already without even knowing it. I’ll tweet the exact quote at some point. Interestingly, he thought the public might be more open to plants that were marketed as ‘green’ rather than native. But aren’t all plants green?
Unless, they are chartreuse.
HI Laura- I wanted to stop by and thank you for the tweets on Armitage! I’m having a lot of fun researching the various plants you’ve been posting- a lot of them I hadn’t seen before! I’m going to have to check out his books!