Gardening with Gordon

10/16/2026

Fall is just starting to fling around here.

10/16/2026

The angel trumpets are "sounding off" even as a possible weekend frost looms here in North Georgia. Hope we can dodge the cold for a bit longer.

10/13/2026

Early light through one of our eastern windows

10/10/2026

10/10/2026

My toad lily produced its first bloom yesterday. Tiny but colorful. I've moved the container into the garage to wait out this tropical weather now buffeting North Georgia.

10/09/2026

After I just about ran the mower over this little guy in some tall grass, I immediately stopped the machine and started a careful search. Ended up finding two more, all within a circle of maybe 12 feet. With a big rain and high winds coming our way tomorrow, I took the liberty of moving the three ninjas a few feet away to the leaf litter on the edge of the woods.

10/07/2026

Many garden plants have interesting tales. So it is with this one here in Georgia.

🌺 In the summer of 1930 a Georgia mill owner stopped his car in Harris County for something that should not have existed.

It was July. Azaleas do not bloom in July. Every azalea in the South is finished by May. But in a shaded ravine near Blue Springs, outside the little town of Hamilton, a wild shrub stood covered in flowers the color of a hot coal.

The man was Cason Callaway of Callaway Mills. The plant was Rhododendron prunifolium, the plumleaf azalea, and it grows wild in only one place on earth, a pocket of ravines within about a hundred miles of Pine Mountain, Georgia. Not Alabama. Not the Carolinas. Nowhere outside that small circle of red clay and spring fed creeks.

It is the latest blooming azalea there is, holding its flowers through July and August when the woods have gone quiet and nothing else is showing color. Deep shade and cool ravine air are the whole trick.

Callaway could not let it go. He started buying up worn out cotton land around Pine Mountain and planting it back, acre after acre, and on May 21, 1952 he opened the place to the public as Ida Cason Gardens. Everyone knows it now as Callaway Gardens. His wife Virginia, the botanist of the pair, spent years making sure the plumleaf would not disappear along with its ravines.

A whole garden, because one man pulled over for a flower nobody else had noticed.

What grows around your part of Georgia that you have never seen anywhere else?

Photo: Shuvaev, CC BY-SA 4.0

10/01/2026

Chestnut oak acorns are among fall's first to drop here in the Southern Appalachians. They're so big and colorful they show up vividly on the forest floor.

09/25/2026

Making hay while the sun shines