An older PhotoShopped image I did a couple years ago. I lost the Nigella, but I still have the image.
Nigella
Category: Annuals
Annual plants I grow.
‘Mt. Fuji’ morning glory
I tried a new morning glory cultivar this year, ‘Mt. Fuji’. At first I thought the foliage was diseased, but it’s just got an interesting mottling to it. I put them in a container and they’re climbing a trellis Marc made on the east side of the house next to the driveway.
Canna flowers
I generally grow cannas for their foliage, but the flowers on these are pretty nice too. They’re in containers this year (including a big, heavy concrete/hypertufa one I made last year to resist blowing over), but plan to put most of them in a bed next to the water garden next year where they should stay nice and wet without watering them every day or so.
Ricinus communis
Ricinus communis (Castor bean)
A friend once asked me why I bothered growing castor beans. Well if not for the foliage, the architectural form, or those cute fuzzy seed pods, maybe it was just to make sure I got on a terrorist watchlist somewhere for being a regular purchaser of seed.
The plant is highly poisonous (hence deer-resistant) and the beans can be processed to make a very potent poison. (A local seed company reported a big sale of seed to some guy who turned out just to be disturbed, not dangerous.) From the Cornell poisonous plants website:
In 1978, ricin was used to assassinate Georgi Markov in 1978, a Bulgarian journalist who spoke out against the Bulgarian government. He was stabbed with the point of an umbrella while waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Station in London. They found a perforated metallic pellet embedded in his leg that had presumably contained the ricin toxin.
