SPOOKY BLOOMS "These aren't your typical Halloween decorations"

  Halloween comes only once a year with all its eerie, spooky and scary ideas and myths. How does your garden fit in with the Halloween season? Do you have spooky plants, eerie plants, scary plants or plants with a mythical story behind them? Will they grow and sneak up behind you while wrapping themselves around your leg, or will they bite you or smell of death?
  Planting a Halloween garden can be a challenge here in North Mississippi, but can be attained easily in South Mississippi. For the most part, you need an enclosed garden or a way to create a microclimate within your garden. Hmmm, something a Witchy Woman or A Spooky Little Girl or a Black Magic Woman could create for you? Chances are that you already have plants in your garden with ghoulish qualities.
  Are you a witch or warlock? Have you planted the right things to concoct all your potions for love, pranks or just for fun? Did you know that in days of old, you could be labeled a witch or warlock simply by the plants you grew in your garden? You know, those plants believed to be used to make potions and cast spells. Things like witches’ thimble, more commonly known as foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), a biennial with tall spikes of bell-shaped flowers in white, pink, purple or red. The entire plant is toxic and while death is a rarity, there have been some cases reported. Some symptoms of ingestion are wild hallucinations and unusual color visions with objects appearing yellowish to green, and blue halos around lights. Devil’s nettle or yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is used to make a poultice for healing wounds. The ancient Greeks used fool’s parsley, or hemlock (Conium spp.), to poison condemned prisoners, the most famous being Socrates. Aconite, better known as monkshood (Aconitum napellus), easily mistaken for horseradish, can make one nauseous and even cause death. Its spiky blue flowers are shaped like a monk’s hood and the root looks like a white carrot. Verbena was used to make a powerful love potion. Opium from poppies (Papaver somniferum) was used for sleep potions and morning glories (Convolvulaceae) for casting wicked spells. There was also an abundance of birth flowers from every month to make sure they could cast a spell over anyone. They planted three or four rows of red-blooming flowers to keep the witch hunters away.
  Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s ride into the night for a look at what might be lurking in your garden. Watch your step as we walk about, careful not to step on a frog or a spider because if you do the “Wicked Witch of the Garden” just might be whipping up a potion from a strand of your hair along with frog eyes or spiders’ legs. The moonflower (Ipomoea alba), a night-blooming relative of the morning glory, fills the garden with its fragrant, large 5-6-inch white flowers that open at dusk to light your way. Moonflower planted from seed each year is a quick-growing climber with large heart-shaped leaves. Night-blooming cereus (Epiphyllum oxypetalum) is a member of the cactus family. The plant itself is not that pretty, but the flowers completely make up for that. They’re huge, fragrant and snow white, coming from “pods” that emerge from the main stem. Cereus flowers are pollinated by moths, so the blooms appear only at night. It can’t tolerate freezing temperatures, but it makes a great potted plant that can be taken outside in the spring and back inside for winter. Dusty miller (Senecio cineraria), a silvery gray plant that can be paired with anything, somewhat resembles the skeleton of a plant that used to be there. The passion vine (Passiflora incarnata), a butterfly plant that resembles a giant purple spider, can grow to 25 feet in a single growing season. Do you have that little plant called monkey cups or pitcher plants (Nepenthes spp.)? These are carnivorous and feed on small insects for the most part; however, they can grow large enough to capture small birds or mice.

  There are many night-flowering plants to enhance your garden: evening primrose (Oenothera spp.), with sweetscented blooms of soft white, pink and bright yellow that open in the evening; angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia spp.) has huge 6-inch white fragrant flowers; night phlox (Zaluzianskya capensis), whose blooms are closed by day and open at night to fill the air with it honey/almond/vanilla fragrance; four o’clocks (Mirabilis jalapa), with a jasmine-like trumpet-shaped bloom that opens late afternoon through the night; ‘Moon Frolic’ and ‘Toltec Sundial’ daylilies (Hemerocallis) only bloom at night; and the yucca (Yucca filamentosa) blooms are open day and night, but only release their fragrance at night. The last one on my list to grow is the ‘Casper’ pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo), a small, white smooth-skinned variety.

The moonflower is a night bloomer that reflects the moonlight
so much that it appears to emit its own light.

   With the setting of the sun, the nighttime garden awakens. Many plants bloom exclusively at night while many more wait until the cool of the evening to release their fragrance. White-flowering plants and those with variegated foliage begin to appear as if they’re lit up as they reflect the moonlight. For those of us who work by day, the garden can be a peaceful refuge in the evening and night. Our nighttime gardening friends, nectar-feeding moths and bats, come out to feed on the nectar and insects.

Te night-blooming cereus is a member of the cactus family
that appears to glow in the night.

  These are just a few of the plants that I discovered to be common to the area. There are many more including the exotic orchids, herbs and vines growing in some of the more elaborate greenhouses.

This is foxglove, an upright biennial that is exceptionally
pretty grown in clusters, which keeps them from flopping over.