My Miller Garden visit, there were a lot of containers!

A visit to the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle is always a highly sought after ticket, my visit on September 18th was just my third, the others were in 2013, and 2022. A tour of the garden's ferns (organized through the Hardy Fern Foundation) was the reason for the trip. In the next post I'll share those ferns, but today's post covers the other things I saw, although I can't promise there won't be a fern or two...

Our group gathered in the house (Pendleton and Elisabeth Miller's home, which now serves as office space for the garden staff and the Great Plant Picks program). We enjoyed coffee and refreshments (as well as bathrooms, much needed after my 4-hour drive up that morning!) and a little time to mingle before we started the garden walk. 

This part of the house always confuses me a bit when I look back at photos. There's an open air space between the house and an enclosed porch space. Of course I spend more time looking at the plants than the architecture.

Isn't this just a beautiful setting? We walked out on to the lawn and paused for our fist fern sighting, but I was drawn to the cordylines, aeoniums and trough containers.

The garden is in a pretty sweet spot near Puget Sound, and listed as USDA Zone 9a, but there's also a greenhouse on site, into which the marginal container specimens can be moved.

Walking on... 

More containers at the back of the house...

And a fern table, Richie Steffen, Executive Director at the garden, is the man behind the fern table craze here in the Pacific Northwest.

I have one of these, a Hedera helix 'Erecta'.  

Theirs looks so much better than mine, I definitely need to put mine in the ground.

Now we're at the edge of the parking area, on the side of the garden that begins the descent down to the deck with the water view. These table plantings were new this year, I think they're calling them pollinator tables (a play on the fern table)...

So many fantastic containers in this garden!

I think this is a Rhododendron macabeanum? I asked my friend Emily Joseph, Assistant Nursery and Retail Sales Manager for the Rhododendron Species BG and if I remember correctly that's what she said. Emily is also the Nursery Manager for the Hardy Fern Foundation and she was one of the tour leaders that day.

Pyrrosia sheareri in a curvy stump (want).

These next few containers are all on the lower deck that has the Puget Sound view.

This would never get old!

More pyrrosia...

There are a few tree ferns, Dicksonia antarctica, growing in the Miller Garden. 

I took this fun begonia shot for Instagram, but decided to share it here too.

I finally got to poke around the greenhouse/nursery area at the garden!

I think these are little baby Cordyline indivisa (we saw big ones in the shot with the stairs towards the beginning of the post)

So organized!

Inside their spore (and more) propagation area...

Itty bitty baby Pyrrosia sheareri (!)...

And nearby, baby agaves too!

Adiantum aleuticum var. subpumilum

Yes, a few more container shots to wrap up the post...

These last couple of plantings are almost too sweet. They make me think of an Easter basket with all those pastel shades.

So springy! Back on Friday to ogle some ferns.

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All material © 2009-2025 by Loree L Bohl. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited and just plain rude.

Late season plant projects

When I wrote about my desire for lava rock—on which to grow a Lemmaphyllum microphyllum (aka bean fern)—my friend Tamara came through with a few different size chunks. Since this one already had moss on it, well, it was the obvious place to start...

I had a 4" pot of Lemmaphyllum microphyllum kicking around (wholesaler Rancho Cacto has made this little cutie widely available to area nurseries) as well as moss and a terracotta saucer, so this project came together quickly.

Since the fern naturally grows as an epiphyte, I separated rooted pieces from the soil they were growing in and tucked them into areas of the rock with holes or crevices, gently enlarging a few spots with a flat-head screwdriver.

The rock then went into the saucer and I packed moss on either side, because I love moss! I keep the saucer full of water (or at least try to) and the moss and rock soak it up. I haven't tested to see if the fern is rooting in yet, I'll give it a while. Eventually, I hope it grows to cover a large portion of the rock. 

Lemmaphyllum microphyllum is *almost* hardy here in Portland, I left two small patches in the ground last winter to test it and it did fine, but last winter didn't get below about 26F (if memory serves) and that was brief. That's to say I plan to put the dish in the shade pavilion greenhouse for the winter, but will pull it into the house if real cold is in the forecast.

I had left over bean fern and rocks so the experimenting continued! You might remember the hanging terracotta container I tried planting up with moss and other epiphytes (post here). Well, over the summer it failed miserably (too dry, squirrels or birds picking at the moss and the plants) so I took it apart and found homes for the plants that were still alive and now it's another Lemmaphyllum microphyllum and rocks planter...

Instead of using potting mix I filled the voids with a rock/bark/clay orb substrate a friend uses to grow his tillandsia (I inherited some of it when he gave me a bunch of tillandsia). Since I'd already plugged the drain hole, it holds water, which slowly leaches out through the terracotta. I'm hoping long-term the surface will start to moss up. 

The last of the Lemmaphyllum microphyllum (with a little bit of soil, and more moss) went into this hollow split bamboo segment I found on the beach. 

I love this easy going fern so much!

The final project today involves tillandsia, one I already had and some that I got from that generous friend, and a piece of cryptanthus. Since all these plants are moving indoors for the next 6 or so months, I've been scheming on where to put them and decided to make a wall hanging to go above the bed. I love how it turned out, but Andrew declared it was creepy. Whatever.

I feel a little bad on the sunny days, that these plants are now indoor prisoners. But when the view out that window turns cold, wet, and windy they're happier inside.

If you're wondering about the low-light situation this group will move down to the brighter "basement garden" when I decorate for Christmas and the tinsel wreath goes up, so it's only temporary.

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All material © 2009-2025 by Loree L Bohl. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited and just plain rude.