Independent gardening advice for real gardens, balconies and windowsills.
Practical advice on growing food and flowers, improving soil, and making the most of small spaces. Start anywhere — the garden will meet you.
This is a valuable dwarf species of the banana from southern China. It bears a large truss of fine fruit, and is cultivated to some extent in Florida, where it endures more cold than the West India sp...
This Abyssinian species forms large foliage of striking beauty. The food is dry and uneatable; but the base of the flower stalk is eaten by the natives.
The banana plant. This has been cultivated and used as food in tropical countries from very remote times, and furnishes enormous quantities of nutritious food, and serves as a staple support to a larg...
The fruits of this West Indian tree are known in commerce as allspice; the berries have a peculiarly grateful odor and flavor, resembling a combination of cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon; hence the name...
This small-foliaged myrtaceous plant is a native of Chili. It bears a glossy black fruit, which has an agreeable flavor and perfume, and is highly esteemed in its native country. The plant is hardy in...
This plant grows in abundance in the Canary Islands and Teneriffe, in dry, rocky districts, where little else can grow, and where it attains a height of 10 feet, with the branches spreading 15 or 20 f...
The assai palm of Para. It grows in swampy lands, and produces a small fruit thinly coated with clotted flesh of which the inhabitants of Para manufacture a beverage called assai. The ripe fruits are...
The center portion of the upper part of the stem of this West Indian palm, including the leaf bud, is eaten either when cooked as a vegetable or pickled, but the tree must be destroyed in order to obt...
This Euphorbiaceous plant is the tallow tree of China. The fruits, are about half an inch in diameter, and each contains three seeds, thickly coated with a fatty substance which yields the tallow. Thi...
This plant furnishes the true jalap-tubers of commerce. They owe their well-known purgative properties to their resinous ingredients. Various species of Ipom[oe]a furnish a spurious kind of this drug,...
This West Indian plant has become naturalized in southern Florida. It belongs to the cinchona family and is known as Jamaica bark. It is also known as Quinquina Caraibe. The bark is reputed to be a go...
The wood apple or elephant apple tree of India, belonging to the family _Aurantiaceae_. It forms a large tree in Ceylon, and yields a hard, heavy wood, of great strength. It yields a gum, which is mix...