Featured Plants at our Fall Plant Sale

It’s almost that time again! Temperatures are cooling down just a little and it’s time to get out into the garden. Oakland’s Fall Plant Sale is the perfect place to find a few exciting additions (have you reserved your shopping spot yet?).

My own garden is in the shade and I’m always excited to find new plants with great promise. One that I’m excited about is Striped Bamboo Fern (Coniogramme emeiensis ‘Golden Zebra’). It’s a fern, not bamboo, so it won’t take over your garden. I was not familiar with it but Tony Avent, owner of Plant Delights in Raleigh, really likes it and says it has been hardy for him. A couple of other new varieties for shade are black snakeroot (Cimicifuga ‘Chocoholic’) which produces dark, lacy foliage topped with sprays of pink to white flowers and trumpet spurflower (Plectranthus effusus), an airy, woodland plant covered with lavender flowers in the fall. There will be many more plants for shade including more Barrenworts (Epimedium) and several varieties of Japanese anemones.

Sun gardeners will have lots to see as well. A new dwarf mockorange (Philadelphus coronarius ‘Illuminati’) is a true breakthrough that is sure to be popular. This mockorange blooms heavily on a 4’ plant and yet retains the wonderful fragrance of the old-fashioned and much larger varieties. We are also pleased to offer blue ladybells (Adenophora confusa ‘Gaudi Violet’), a hard-to-find perennial whose 24” spikes of blue flowers resemble a delicate foxglove. Orange bulbine lilies (Bulbine frutescens ‘Orange’—shown above) look much like narrow-leaved aloe but are topped with an abundance of flower spikes covered in golden orange stars.

We also have a large number of native plants and pollinator plants this year. We have gathered a wide selection of these natives, including many that were selected for their reduced size and free-blooming nature. Some, such as the Stokes asters (Stokesia laevis ‘Mary Gregory’ and ‘Divinity’) are unusual yellow- and white-flowered varieties. Others were chosen for their more manageable size, but all are garden-worthy. We have an assortment of different asters, Rudbeckias, dwarf Joe Pye weeds, a white-blooming turtlehead (Chelone glabra), white muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris ‘White Cloud’), several Agastache, ironweed (Vernonia lettermanii ‘Iron Butterfly’), and much more.

The dwarf mockorange is mentioned above but it is far from the only woody plant we’re offering. One of the most exciting is a dwarf viburnum (Viburnum cassinoides ‘Lil’ Ditty’) that is covered with flowers on a beautiful, 24” shrub! Syringa x ‘Baby Kim’ is a dwarf form of lilac that will bloom in the South and the wonderful new, copper-colored ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolium ‘Ginger Wine’) almost glows.

These are just a few of the exciting plants that will be available at Oakland Cemetery’s Fall Plant Sale on September 24 and 25. You can find more of them on a partial inventory list here.

Reservations are required for the sale. Get yours now at Eventbrite. Your ticket price will be credited toward your purchase.

We will be following City of Atlanta and CDC guidelines so please bring your mask. We’re looking forward to seeing you.

Photo credits:
Feature photo: Bulbine frutescens: By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4907018
Plectranthus effusus: https://nurcar.com/products/plectranthus-effusus-var-longitubus
Viburnum cassinoides ‘Lil’ Ditty’: https://www.provenwinners.com/plants/viburnum/lil-ditty-witherod-viburnum-viburnum-cassinoides