AMERICAN GARDENER

Wasabi has a genuine reputation as one of the hardest commercial crops to grow successfully, and that reputation holds up even for a home gardener working on a much smaller scale. Its native habitat, cold, shaded mountain streams in Japan, is about as far from an average backyard as a growing condition gets, so success … Read more

Japan’s Most Difficult and Misunderstood Crop The wasabi plant is responsible for one of the most recognizable flavors in the world, yet the vast majority of people who’ve eaten “wasabi” at a sushi restaurant have never actually tasted it. Genuine wasabi is notoriously difficult and expensive to grow, and most of what gets served as … Read more

Ashwagandha is the common name most often applied to Withania somnifera, a small evergreen shrub in the nightshade family that’s been used in Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. But “ashwagandha” sits within a larger genus, Withania, which Kew’s Plants of the World Online currently recognizes as containing 19 accepted species, while other published reviews … Read more

Ashwagandha is a small, woody shrub in the nightshade family, and identifying it correctly comes down to checking a handful of specific features together, since no single trait alone is enough to confirm the plant. Its scientific name, Withania somnifera, is also sold as Indian ginseng or winter cherry, and several close relatives within the … Read more

Cumin is the dried seed of Cuminum cyminum, a flowering plant in the carrot and parsley family, and it ranks among the most widely used spices on Earth despite coming from a single, relatively unassuming annual herb. Known as jeera across South Asia, cumin’s warm, earthy flavor is foundational to Indian, Middle Eastern, North African, … Read more

The Ice Age Survivor That Became a Garden Favorite Serbian spruce is a graceful, narrow conifer with a genuinely remarkable backstory: a tree that once grew across a much wider stretch of Europe, was pushed nearly to extinction by successive ice ages, and today survives in the wild on a strip of land smaller than … Read more

The Stately Conifer of the High Rockies Engelmann spruce is the tree standing at timberline in the Rocky Mountains, a tall, narrow, spire-shaped conifer that thrives in exactly the cold, wet, high-altitude conditions few other trees can tolerate. Look for the tallest, straightest trees near the edge of a subalpine forest, and there’s a good … Read more

Fir trees belong to the genus Abies, a group of evergreen conifers in the pine family recognized by their needle-like leaves that grow directly from the branch and leave a distinctive round, suction-cup-shaped scar once they fall. The genus contains somewhere between 40 and 56 recognized species depending on the source, with most modern counts … Read more

The boreal forest isn’t one uniform block of trees stretching across the northern hemisphere. Ecologists studying the biome, going back to a foundational 1972 classification by researchers Hare and Ritchie, have long divided it into distinct structural zones that shift as you move from its warmer southern edge toward the Arctic tundra, along with a … Read more