Last weekend I had the opportunity to call in a beautiful public garden in Alexandria , Va. Twenty minutes from the Capitol Building , Green Spring Gardens is a National Historic Site primitively donated to Fairfax County by its previous owners , Michael and Belinda Straight . The Mungo Park comprises 27 demesne and boast a veggie garden , Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and bush planting , perennial perimeter , container - grown tropicals , timber planting and a lovely rock garden . There ’s also a gift shop , horticultural library and educational programing . Here are some of my favorite photos of Green Spring Gardens and information about the cool plants I find there .
The vegetable garden demonstrates techniques for trellising veggie and highlights some new vegetable varieties . I love the raised seam with fictile hoops that , when covered with charge plate or a framework row back , do as a little greenhouse . There are many deer in the parking lot , so the full vegetable garden is surround by 8 - foot - eminent charge plate mesh deer netting .
The parking lot at Green Spring Gardens is knell with planting that collaborator cutter tropical plant with hearty perennial and grasses . I jazz the textural differences between the Bourgogne - leaved castor edible bean flora , the chartreuse elephant ear and the variegated decorative weed .
Here are two other examples showing the stunning results of partnering large - leaved tropicals with tender and finely textured annual , like salvias and coleus . I hump the spiky , motley yucca plant in the vanguard of the first flick .
Among the several young - to - me plants I discovered at Green Spring Garden are Asclepias physocarpa ( otherwise known as “ hairy balls ” ! ) and the astonishing purpleness , trumpet - like blooms of Royal Queen Iochroma . I ’m in love !
There were an extraordinary number of gorgeous container - raise combinations in the garden . Here are two of my darling : a reddish - leave canna with orange lantana nest into a huge blue Mary Jane and an agave topping off a birdbath !
And finally , I greatly enjoy walking through the rock garden which was posit on a dealings island in the center of the circular private road . It was fill up with small conifers , manger gardens and tough minuscule alpine plants .
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