Welcome to California Plants

Welcome to California-plants.com! We are based in California, which is why this Website is called California Plants. We test and study plants to share information with you about vegetables, grasses, perennial plants, annual plants, roses, trees, bulbs, shrubs, vines and other plants. The information you’ll read here can help with growing these plants in many other areas in the world, with an emphasis on California.

We feel what sets us apart is that we have learned from not just books, classes in college, videos, and You Tube. We have run garden and Orchid nurseries, studied with great growers and tested a ton. Testing a means failing at times, but also discovering some amazing things. When we discover new techniques that work well, we build on them and test more.

Here are a couple sample plants from our test garden:

At the upper right is a photo of Foxglove (Digitalis) plants from our home garden. Tubular, long lasting flowers are produced on tall flower spikes. We have been growing mostly purple and white Foxglove plants, but they also come in pink, gray and yellow. Foxglove plants are biennials, blooming in all their glory the second year. They are easy to grow if provided with rich soil. Although it does take time to grow these biennial plants, the magnificent flowers are worth the wait.

Blooming in the photo to the right are Blanket Flower (Gaillardia) plants in our test garden. As you can see they are packed with flowers.

These drought tolerant plants bloom in the summer. Perfect for California, they easily seed and grow in tough conditions. Gaillardia plants generally have branched flower stems up to two feet in height.

This particular group of Blanket Flowers in the photo is special to us, as it seeded here from another spot in our garden. It started out as one plant and in the last couple months not only hasn’t stopped blooming but has quadrupled in size. That means it went from a handful of vibrant blooming flowers to more than twenty at the moment. When it is done flowering, we will collect the seeds, and leave some seeds on the plant to self seed in the garden. This flower can do well with poor or rich soil. Although it should bloom without much watering, it will grow more and thrive with some care.

There are many plants beyond these two examples which you can learn about on this Website. Simply explore the navigation at the right to find our latest posts, plant categories, archives or the search box.