A few years ago, Norman Sturdivant was upset about his pomegranate. “It has the most lovely orange blooms,” he said. “But I never see any fruits.”

The next year was different. It was dry. Bone dry. The drought-resistant pomegranate, grown for thousands of years in the deserts of Egypt and Iran, and in the rocky dry hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan, didn’t mind the dryness. The fruits came on like gangbusters.

This turned out to be a great year for pomegranates, too. They hung heavily on Sturdivant’s neatly trimmed tree this year.

Norman was so excited, he called to tell me about the tree. “You’ve just got to see this,” he said.

He was right. The sight was something I wouldn’t want to miss.

The best thing about the pomegranate, to me, is its beauty. Its foliage stays healthy and pretty until it yellows and drops neatly in autumn.

The trunks are beautiful as Sturdivant’s tree-form pruning shows. And the flowers are a memorable shade of orange. The color can’t be missed by motorists passing by, even if they get only a glimpse.

And the fruits. Well, the pictures speak for themselves. They are huge and colorful.

For many people, the best thing about pomegranates is the flavor. I’ve developed a fondness for eating the very acid fruity sweet gel-like stuff surrounding the seeds. But grenadine, the syrup made from the fruits, is too sweet for me.

Pomegranate is known botanically as Punica granatum.

The variety Sturdivant grows is the overwhelming favorite of gardeners. It is known as ‘Wonderful.’ One very old name for the pomegranate comes from the Ancient Egyptian rmn, from which comes the Hebrew rimmôn, and Arabic rummân. I found this information in Wikipedia.

This Egyptian name was given by Arabs to other languages, including the Hebrew (‘rimmon’). The pomegranate (‘rimmôn’) is mentioned in the Bible as one of the seven fruits that Israel was blessed with, and in Hebrew, ‘rimmôn’ is the name of the weapon now called the grenade. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word grenade originated about 1532 from the French name for the pomegranate, la grenade.

La grenade also gives us the word grenadine, the name of the syrup, originally made from pomegranates, which is widely used as a cordial and in cocktails.

In Russia the fruit is called Granat, thought to have influenced the word Granata meaning Grenade. The shape of the fruit and its contents of many small  seeds makes it look like a grenade.

And in Latin America, the fruit is named “granada,” also meaning grenade.

A cattail turns fuzzy in the winter sun in the Cape Fear Botanical Garden.

One of my favorite musical ballads is Gordon Lightfoot’s “Pussy Willows, Cattails, Soft Winds and Roses.” I especially like the reference to Cattails.

Cattails were one of my favorite toys as a child. They were prolific in marshy areas along a bank of the Pee Dee River in Wallace, S.C., near Cheraw, where I lived as a grade-school boy.

The plants were great for making windblown fuzz, waging sword fights, and starting fires. Our mothers would have been horrified to know that we stacked the fuzzy tails like teepees and lit them to make a big blaze. We also played with firecrackers placed in mud pies, soda bottles and other objects to see what would happen. It’s probably a miracle that we all survived with our fingers and toes intact.

We never thought of eating the cattail’s roots, but American Indians once used these plants extensively for food by scraping the tasty, starchy roots to remove the edible parts from the strong fiber inside.

Some birds use the fuzz to line their nests. The downy material was also used by Indians to line moccasins and papoose boards. The fiber is still used like down for bedding, clothing and pillows. But it is reported to cause some folks to itch furiously. So an extra layer of fine fabric is needed to keep the fuzz from becoming an irritant.

The most important role of the cattail is to preserve and protect wetlands. The numerous windblown seeds insure that the plants are widespread in wet areas. The strong, lateral stolons spread the plants quickly without seeds, however. And great colonies provide cover and food for wildlife while holding soil in place during annual flooding and heavy rain.

On top of all that, the plant is interesting and beautiful in its own right. Picking bouques can require wading boots, unless you grow your own cattail patch on the edge of a pond.

Cattails in the Cape Fear Botanical Garden grow in marshy areas near garden’s large pond where they are functional and accessible.

Small species of cattails are grown in koi ponds and garden pools. The plants readily survive transplanting from the wild. And they do not require a pond at all. They can be grown anywhere that you can water them two or three times a week.

But beware. These are not plants that will stay where you plant them. Given a little fertilizer once a year and plenty of water, they will tend to gallop.

One more thing you ought to know about cattails, besides their appeal to children. They have an interesting sex life. The male is that skinny little stick that rises above the fat part of the fuzzy head. Tiny anthers on short styles along the skinny appendage drop pollen down onto the female plant parts just when they are ready.

Since the plants are wind-pollinated, nearby male pollen often drifts in to the female pistils. So there is always some competition for breeding rights. The pollen grows down the pistil tubes into the ovaries and fertilizes the tiny eggs.

When the flower head goes to seed, each tiny seed is attached to a tuft of feathery hairs that can be caught by the wind and carried undreds of yards to create new colonies of cattails.

You can even print them out and save them as a book if you don’t trust your hard drive to live forever.

I don’t mean to brag. It’s just that I don’t want you to miss the opportunity to save these posts so you can use the next 100 or so  Plant of the Day  blogs I do as a plant-selection handbook for your garden.

Web pages come and go. So watch for my posts five days a week listing one new plant each day that I can strongly recommend for your garden. Then archive those pages on your computer so you will always have them.

Then, when you need a plant that’s ideal for a certain purpose, you can look at your handbook and pick out what’s best.

This is something I have done before and may do again. Perhaps this will be a published book someday. But for now, you don’t need to go buy a book, just hang on to these daily blogs and make your own.

Every week or two, I’ll do an index with dates the plants were described so you can them by date. I’ll try to give some idea of the best place to get the plants I’m writing about.

Those of you familiar with my previous plant-of-the-day effort, which began in November 2007, will find the selections and suggestions different this time, with far more plants listed. Most of the great ones listed before will appear again, with more information. Some won’t make the cut.

And Carol Fleitz, the plant selection and garden design guru at the Cape Fear Botanical Garden, has added many great plants for this plant of the day book you’re getting. Her selections will start appearing as soon as I can take pictures for them. You’ll love her picks as much as I do.

History may have lost track of the ginkgo, but nature hasn’t. A handful of the trees has survived the 200 million years that have passed since the age of the dinosaurs.

Traces of the tree can be seen in seams of coal that began forming when Tyrannosaurus rex was in its heyday. For centuries, the delicate tracery of the leaves and imprints of the trunks and stems were all the scientists knew of the tree. It was believed to have taken its place among the extinct giant tree ferns and soaring pterodactyls.

But it is now known to grow in at least two small areas in Zhejiang province in Eastern China, in the Tian Mu Shan Reserve. Ginkgo biloba trees in these areas may have been tended and preserved by Chinese monks for over 1000 years, according to an entry in Wikepedia.

You don’t have to go to China to see Ginkgo trees, however. There are some beautiful, large specimens in Fayetteville.

The tree above was photographed last fall in a garden in the Haymount area of Fayetteville.

The autumn color of the leaves is one of the ginkgo’s great attractions. The form of the leaves is so delicate and elegant that much jewelry has come to be made in the shape of the leaves.

The unique feature of the leaves is how the veins flow from the leaf stem out to the leaf edges without dividing into a network.

Technically, the ginkgo is a gymnosperm and is more closely related to pines and junipers than to such trees as oaks and maples.

The tree may begin growth slowly in our hot climate, but eventually it can become quite large. A height of 80 feet is common within 60 years here. In cooler climates the tree can easily exceed 100 feet.

Young trees are upright. As they age, the trees develop broader crowns, and some limbs may extend at odd angles.

The trees live to great age in China, with one specimen showing more than 3,000
rings in a core sample. That means the tree is more than 3,000 years old.

Ginkgos are commonly found in garden centers and nurseries nowadays. And they are well worth growing.

A few gingkos can be seen on the campus of Methodist University. They are remnants of an extensive grove of the trees planted about 45 years ago.

Most of the trees were lost to extensive damage from string trimmers. The damage began to be inflicted in the 1970s with the advent of the implements.

String trimmers are the leading killers of decorative trees in America. No young tree can long survive repeated attacks with a string trimmer.

Some botanists call the ginkgo a living fossil. But I call it a tough old geezer. The ginkgo’s tenacity may be seen in Hiroshima, Japan, where four trees growing near the 1945 atom bomb explosion were among the few living things in the area to survive. While almost all other plants and animals in the area were destroyed, the ginkgos, though charred, survived and were soon healthy again. The trees are alive to this day.

Ginkgos also take well to pampering, however. They are popular subjects for growing as penjing and bonsai; they can be kept artificially small and tended for many decades.

Stewartia malacodendron is one of the most beautiful of our native spring-blooming trees. And some years it blooms again in autumn. There were just a smattering of fall blooms this year in my yard on a tree I rooted from the one stand of trees found about 60 years ago in Cumberland County.

I don’t know how this tree came to be known as the Cape Fear dogwood. The tree is not indigenous only to the Cape Fear region. It is found in many parts of the South, but particularly along the Coastal Plain and in coastal N.C. counties.

This tree, rooted about 25 years ago, is about 16 feet tall. It would be 14 feet or so wide, but I’ve pruned it up, keeping the lower trunks of the multitrunked tree bare to keep limbs out of the driveway beside it.

The white flowers are about 4 inches across and are crinkled along the edges like the wrinkling in fine silk. For that reason, one common name of this plant is silky stewartia.

It is similar to another species of stewartia found in the South, Stewartia ovata. Ovata does not have the deep maroon color in the stamens that our silky or Cape Fear dogwood has. But ovata, found mostly in the Appalachian mountains and in a stand near Williamsburg, Va., is hardier to cold and can grow farther north. Ovata has mostly yellow stamens and slightly smaller, less regularly formed flowers.

Both plants are in the tea family and are related to camellias, another Southern favorite. There are several Asian species of Stewartia, and all are decorative and well worth growing in our gardens.

The Cape Fear dogwood produces many seeds from round green pods about 3/4 inch in diameter. The flower buds, which have formed for spring blooms, are about the same size, shape and color as the seed pods. The color of both is a bright chartreuse green until maturity. They add another decorative aspect to this fine small tree

The dark brown to black seeds are half the size of my little fingernail and have a very hard coat. They seldom sprout. They easiest way I have found to reproduce this tree is to place semihard cuttings under mist in late May. Almost 100 percent of cuttings will root with the right medium and with the application of a liquid rooting hormone.

Photos by Roger Mercer

A portulaca blooms in midsummer in the garden of Nydia Andres in Fayetteville.

Portulacas sown seven days ago are  poking up their tiny seed leaves in the greenhouse. If all goes well, I will have a bumper crop of them blooming in pots and beds this summer.

The prettiest portulacas come from Brazil. It’s good to know that Brazil has more to offer than Petrobras, ethanol, coffee and the world’s biggest river. Portulacas won their post as today’s top plant for their performance in this year’s drought and heat.

Portulacas actually prefer the heat. They are tender annuals that can’t cope with cool weather. You have to avoid planting them out too early in April or they will be stunted by the cool weather and will fail to perform well.

They’re easy to grow from the tiny seeds. Just mix the seeds with sand so they can be uniformly distributed and sprinkle the mixture over a well prepared bed. Don’t cover the seeds. They need the sun to sprout. In fact, One of the common names of this plant is sun rose, because of its habit of opening its flowers only while the hot sun is directly illuminating the buds. A more common name of the short, dense plant is moss rose. Though it is not related to mosses or roses.

Modern portulacas have been bred to keep their flowers open all day, from early morning until sunset. Even dark clouds won’t keep the flowers of the newer types from opening.

Portulacas were at their best in many gardens where I saw them this summer. The last portulaca blooms I saw were open a couple of weeks ago in urns on Norman Sturdivant’s front porch in the Haymount section of Fayetteville.

Though the plants tolerate drought, they grow and flower better with regular watering. The roots are shallow, so you don’t have to water much to saturate the root zone. And you don’t have to water often because the thick, fleshy, roundish leaves store enough water to get the plant through most of a dry week. Watering every five days is adequate, but every four days is better in sandy soil. In pots, water may be needed every other day or even daily in a small pot that dries fast.

Portulacas, because of their low, sprawling habit, look good in hanging baskets. Baskets planted with them can be bought in garden centers in April. The individual plants also are available, but avoid buying them too early because of their tendency to be stunted by cool weather.

Portulacas open their last few blooms of the season in October on Norman Sturdivant’s front porch in Haymount.

Roger Mercer

Laceleaf Japanese maples are among the most lusted after of all garden plants. And ‘Crimson Queen’ is one of the best.

This colorful weeping, shrub draws more delighted reaction from visitors than any other plant i grow, except perhaps for some of the new daylilies that I breed.

One reason that so many react is that everyone who visits sees the tree. It is planted 30 feet from my front door and is almost 12 feet across. In other words, you can’t miss it. It is an unusually large ‘Crimson Queen’ maple.

The tree is about 33 years old. I planted it the year I moved to Fayetteville from Virginia: 1979. It was perhaps two years old then.

It has grown larger than I expected and hangs a foot or so over the front walk. I have pruned it a little, but my heart isn’t in pruning it. There is no way I can improve on the form that nature has provided in this plant.

All of the Japanese maples are excellent, and one laceleaf Japanese maple is so similar to this one that the two are difficult to distinguish. It is called ‘Burgundy Lace.’ The only way I can tell them apart is that ‘Crimson Queen’ has slightly better color at some times of the year and slightly finer-textured leaves, and ‘Burgundy Lace’ has a more grayish sheen over the leaves at certain stages of unfolding and is a far more upright plant

Both are beautiful trees that naturally form an artistic array of branches that are at their glory in the dead of winter when there are no leaves.

But the most blazing colors appear in spring as the leaves unfold and the brilliant red flowers appear and again in fall when the colors are just as bright as they were in spring, simetimes brighter.

The deep red color persists through most of the summer, and the leaves remain in good shape as long as they have an hour or two of shade late in the day.

Irrigation is needed for the first two or three years. But eventually, this tree becomes as tough and heavily rooted as you’d expect a maple to be.

Among dwarf trees, Japaneses maples offer some of the best cultivars. More of them will become Plants of the Day.

The best sources for Japanese maples are local. You can get good deals if you shop hard among local plant retailers.

Here are some good mail order and online sources: Fairweather Gardens, PO Box 330, Greenwich, NJ 08323
Gossler Farms Nursery, 1200 Weaver Rd., Springfield, OR 97478-9691; 541-746-3922
Greer Gardens, Inc., 1280 Goodpasture Island Rd., Eugene, OR 94724-1794; 800-548-0111
Rare Find Nursery: http://www.rarefindnursery.com

I saw them there earlier today. I suspect they just came in and may or may not yet be available at other Wal-Mart stores in the Cape Fear region.

Just thought I’d let those of you who want to make raised beds for azaleas or vegetables know, since I recently recommended this as a cheap way to make up for not having your own compost.

If you have plenty of your own compost, then you don’t need any composted manure.

The bright gold, creeping ‘Mother Lode’ juniper is used for color in a composition that also features natural stones, a sculpted head, and other plants that include sempervivums in the center of the foreground, artemesia to the right, front of the sempervivums, a green creeping juniper in the right foreground, four dwarf japanese hollies, a very tiny Japanese maple in the arc of the centerpiece stone, a variegated dogwood in the background, a weepiing hemlock to the left of the dogwood, and other colorful plants. Lights are placed to highlight the stones at night. The garden is owned and maintained by Linda Pinkham near Newport News, Va.

Creeping junipers mostly give me the creeps. But there are two I can tolerate. Actually, I like them both. They are the Japanese garden juniper, Juniperus procumbens, and the gold-colored Juniperus horizontalis called ‘Mother Lode.’

Today’s plant is the gold one, ‘Mother Lode.’ This is relatively restrained for a creeping juniper. It does not eventually require a giant removal project the way some creepers do. It hugs the ground and forms a tight, dense mat of bright gold that takes on tobacco tints in the winter, but mostly keeps a very good gold color.

The effect of a big patch can be a little overwhelming. You wouldn’t want to use it for your front lawn. But in the right place, and in contrast with other natural colors, such as the stone, and colorful leaves in the photo, it can be just the perfect plant.

This requires full sun or nearly full sun to display its best color. Too much shade can take the snap away from the gold hue. Moderate fertilizer and occasional irrigation also are required. Too much fertilizer will ruin the color and can burn the plant.

This golden yellow witch hazel, sold as ‘Goldzauber,’ lived in my back yard for 18 years. It grew to 15 feet high and nearly 20 feet across before it was cut down because of a misunderstanding. It looked like a giant forsythia when in full bloom. It wafted an exceptional fragrance for 50 feet around and made winter garden walks worthwhile.

The new Chinese witch hazel hybrid in my back yard is taking on its brilliant yellow flower colors as the narrow petals begin to unfurl. The brilliant golden-yellow fall leaves are long gone.

I once had a huge witch hazel. Now I have a new baby one. Unfortunately, all that is left of the big witch hazel is a forlorn-looking stump.

This was my favorite tree. Its fall color was the most impressive in my garden. By now, many fragrant golden flowers would have opened. In  late February, the tree would still be in full bloom, its yellow-gold flowers with burgundy hearts spreading their soft honey fragrance throughout the garden.

The last of the blooms would not be seen until April, a couple of weeks before the fuzz-covered, large, heart-shaped leaves began to unfurl.

The tree resembled at its peak of bloom a 15-foot forsythia. Who could ask for more in a tree?

Oh, you want to know what happened to the tree?

I commented to my hard-of-hearing father one day while walking past the tree that I needed to cut away a few sprouts coming from below the graft. You must understand my late dad’s frame of mind. His take on my garden was that it was a weedy, overgrown, out-of-control mess. While I regard it as a collection of thickets that serve as nesting sites for birds and cover for other animals.

He saw the 10-foot-high blackberry thickets as evil. I saw them as friendly. He thought my half-acre patch of akebia run amok was evidence of lackadaisical care. I saw it as a Garden of Eden for toads that eat mosquitos and snakes that eat voles.

So, you can imagine the outcome. The next morning after our garden walk, I awoke to the sound of a chain saw. That was four years ago

Finally, last fall, I decided it was time for the period of mourning to end.  I went shopping for a nice Chinese witch hazel hybrid. The old one, pictured above,   was grown for 18 years in my back yard.

For my first new witch hazel, I wanted ‘Arnold Promise,’ a bright yellow, very fragrant cultivar resulting from a cross of a Japanese witch hazel with a Chinese witch hazel.

I found it last fall at the Cape Fear Botanical Garden’s fall plant sale. It is now beginning to open its blooms, more numerous and more fragrant than my earlier favorite, but with smaller flowers.

If you want to find more information about these witch hazels, you’ll need to know their correct names. The Chinese witch hazel is Hamamelis mollis. The hybrid witch hazel is called Hamamellis Xintermedia. A space may appear after the X in some listings, but no space is correct.

Here are some sources for Hamamelis Xintermedia ‘Arnold Promise,’ and others, in case you’d like to consider them for your garden:

Fairweather Gardens, PO Box 330, Greenwich, NJ 08323
Gossler Farms Nursery, 1200 Weaver Rd., Springfield, OR 97478-9691; 541-746-3922
Greer Gardens, Inc., 1280 Goodpasture Island Rd., Eugene, OR 94724-1794; 800-548-0111
Minner Nursery Co., 12745 Mason Manor Rd., Creve Coeur, MO 63141; 314-576-5697

Rare Find Nursery: http://www.rarefindnursery.com

Below is a photo of the new ‘Arnold Promise’ shot this morning when it was too cold for its long, slender petals to fully unfurl.