I love visiting gardens. I enjoy seeing the personal edens other gardeners create around their homes and I can spend hours wandering public gardens, picking up tips and inspiration.
When you think about it, it's amazing that we have so many people willing to put their time and efforts into creating and maintaining public gardens What could be better than a garden where the sole purpose is to delight and inspire me?

You've heard me encourage people to take advantage of programs like the Garden Conservancy's Open Days, where some of the finest gardens in the U.S., public and private, open their gates for a day or two. If you're an unabashed garden tour junkie, like me, please share some thoughts on your favorite. I'm pulling together garden profiles from the gardeners point of view to, hopefully, encourage even more of you to put on your walking shoes and become a garden tour fanatic.

Photo: Tea Cup Garden at Chanticleer. © Marie Iannotti

Some vegetables really need to hire better PR people. The poor sweet potato suffers from being confused with the yam. No relation. And the potato. No relation. Sweet potatoes are high in fiber and good sources of Vitamins A & C. How many sweet foods can claim that?

Although they're available year round, they're in season in November and December, making them popular holiday foods. But did you ever think of growing your own sweet potatoes and having a few baby sweet potatoes to snack on in early fall? Or harvesting sweet potato greens all summer? Unfortunately sweet potatoes need a fairly long growing season and a good amount of space, but it's nice to try growing everything at least once, just to know what they're really supposed to taste like.

Looking for Something Different for the Holiday Table?

• Sweet Potato Patties
• Kurikinton Recipe (Japanese New Year Food)
• Caribbean Spiced Sweet Potatoes
• Vegan Pralined Sweet Potatoes

Photo by Scott Bauer. Provided by USDA Ag. Research Service.

Plant names can be very confusing. One person's 'Love Lies Bleeding' is another's 'Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate'. Then there are those taxonomy enigmas where Actaea is the plant formerly known as Cimicifuga. My feeling is, if the person you're talking to knows what you're talking about, it doesn't really matter if you've got the right name or know how to pronounce it in Latin.

The only time it's truly important that you get the name of a plant right is when you are shopping for a specific plant. The full Latin name will guarantee you get the plant you intended. But even then, it's not important to know the difference between cultivar and variety. Where these terms factor in is if you're planning to propagate more plants. So what's the difference?

Variety

Varieties happen naturally. Plant varieties are changes in a plant species that occur in nature, through cross-pollination, mutation and adaptation. For instance, when a white flowering variety is discovered of a plant that has only been known to bloom pink.

Most varieties will produce seed that grows a plant just like them.

Variety names follow the species and are always italicized and lower case, for example, alba: Baptisia leucantha alba. (Older nomenclature sometimes designated varieties by preceding the name with the abbreviation var.)

Cultivar

Cultivar is a contraction of "cultivated variety". Cultivars are plants that have been intentionally bred to have certain characteristics, like purple foliage or more petals. Cultivars don't occur naturally.

Cultivars usually do not grow true from seed and will need to be propagated by some means other than seed, like grafting, cuttings or repeated hybridization. However they are only considered a cultivar if the distinguishing characteristics that make them unique from the original plants are retained when they are propagated.

Cultivar names are not italicized. They appear after the species name and are enclosed in single quotes, for example: Coreopsis verticillata 'Zagreb'. (Older nomenclature sometimes designated cultivars by preceding the name with the abbreviation cv.)

I have a love/hate relationship with fall. I bet a lot of you do, too. It's not that I hate winter; I actually enjoy winter sports and there's nothing to compare with the sunrise after a snow storm. Still, I'd rather be outside gardening.

Fall color is nature's way of easing us into the bleakness of February, in northern climates. One last hurrah and then hunker down and be patient. All the more reason to celebrate fall and that's just what the photographers in our October Garden Photo Challenge did. It was total eye candy and very hard to come to a consensus on the winning photos. But we've reached our decision and here they are, the winners of the Fall Color Photo Challenge.

The Nov/Dec challenge has already been posted. It's Holiday Plants, appropriately enough. And by that we mean anything you do with plants, to celebrate and decorate for any of the upcoming holidays. Centerpieces, cornucopias, pots on the porch, decorations on the mantle. Share your holidays with us.

Congratulations to this month's winners and thank you to everyone who submitted photos!

1st Place Photo: Fall Solitude.

Submitted by AmrJoe76