Your Favourite Old Time Plants/Shrubs/Trees

sanjidasayla9

I was just thinking of some of the "old time" plants, etc. that were all around whilst I was a youngster. Some of them that I loved:

--Lady Slippers (I think technically these are orchids)

--Rain Trees

--Hens and Chicks

--Honeysuckle Vine

--Black-eyed Susans

--Morning Glory

--Heliotrope

--Four o' Clocks

--Hollyhocks

--Fig Trees

--Magnolias

What are some of your favourites? Inquiring minds want to know! Big Grin

gjautos

I still grow honeysuckle and hollyhocks😁. I also love snap dragons. I dont grow them anymore but they remind me of my childhood. 

GemmaJF

gjautos said:

I still grow honeysuckle and hollyhocks😁. I also love snap dragons. I dont grow them anymore but they remind me of my childhood. 

honeysuckle, hollyhocks and snap dragons, were my thoughts also, like a time machine back to my childhood  Have honeysuckle, really ought to do some hollyhocks and snap dragons. 

BenCotto

My memories are of making daisy chains, and pop guns from plantains. We’d stuff the tubes of dried cow parsley with straw and then set light to them, pretending we were smoking cigars. Crushed dock leaves were used on nettle stings, and dead nettles, grasped in the hand after the nectar had been sucked out, were used for chasing the unwary who believed them to be real nettles. Principal targets were those who held buttercups under others’ chins to see if they liked butter. Daisy petals were used as divination of true love.


The conker season was always a highlight, though rife with accusations of cheating from someone who had practised dastardly misdeeds such as pickling a conker in vinegar and baking it in the oven. “Strings” and “no stamps” were widespread and I seem to remember the first conker of the season was greeted with the rhyme ‘oddly, oddly onker, my first conker.’ Trust played a major part in the game because a winning conker assumed the victory values of the vanquished conker. “He’s got an elevenser,” we would say in awe.

gjautos

@GemmaJF. Hollyhocks grow a little too well in my garden. They self seed everywhere! I dig some of them up and give them to friends or neighbours.

Mary370

All the above plus gladioli, I just love them

BenCotto

This has got me thinking about my parents’ garden. God, it was pretty awful. It was very suburban and very regimented with alternating blobs of blue lobelia and white alyssum lining those oh-so-straight paths. I remember nothing but roses in the borders , stiff angular hybrid teas for the most part and my mother was an disciple of the ‘nice splash of colour’ school of gardening so in her view Orangeade rose harmonised perfectly with the deep pink Queen Elizabeth. In the shed were bottles and bottles of chemicals and an old fashioned sprayer. The garden was an exclusion zone for wild life

The vegetable garden was better. The back fence was covered in loganberries, still a great favourite, and the winter digging and lining of the runner bean trench paid rich dividends. Another strong memory was the burial of Chins the cat - Colonel Chin Strap to give him his full name though I thought of him as Lazarus because he was twice dug up by a fox before finally being laid to rest.

Buttercupdays

From my childhood home I remember delphiniums,  Rose 'New Dawn' and  others that my mother loved, like 'Peace', and lily of the valley. I grow the first 2 but can't convince the last one to stay!

What I loved best though was wildflowers, had my Little 'Observer's Book of Wildflowers' and took it with me whenever we went out, looking for something I hadn't met before. Especially loved wild primroses and bluebells and so happy that they grow well in my present garden.