We’re famous, we’re famous! In the last issue of People Places Plants, my submission about my daughter’s Harry Potter Garden to their PPP Community section was published. It started out as a comment made to a post on garden journals and labeling on GardenRant.com

Here is what it said:

For Garden Walk Buffalo each year, my nine-year-old daughter, Margaux, and I, buy the oddest-looking plants we can find when we’re doing the nursery rounds in the spring.

We plant these in her garden and give them all names of plants that can be found in the Harry Potter books. A corkscrew rush becomes Gillyweed (Looking like slimy, greyish-green rat tails, it tastes slimy and rubbery, like octopus tentacles. When eaten, causes the user to grow gills, webbed feet and webbing between fingers. The effect lasts for about an hour.) A funny-looking sedum become Bubotuber (Thick, slug-like plants. It is normal for them to squirm, covered in pus-filled swellings. The pus itself creates severe irritation on the skin – dragon-hide gloves are suggested. In a dilute form it may be used as a cure for acne.) 

A redbud becomes the wand-making hornbeam, an over-wintering cactus becomes stinksap-spewing mimbulus mimbletonia. Morning glories become devil’s snare - which seems a more appropriate name for them anyway. Add in some fluxweed, scurvy grass, venomous tentacula, gurdyroot and a puffapod and we have well-labeled and documented plantings. 

The best part is to see people (muggles) reading the tags and taking notes and photos during Garden Walk, one person even asked where they could buy them. That's when I have to break it to them that this is a fictional garden.

People Places Plants The Magazine for Northeastern Gardeners, is published in New Gloucester, Maine. The editor-in-chief and publisher is author and former HGTV host Paul Tukey of SafeLawns.org fame. The photograph was taken by PPP creative director Ann Casady.