Garden Design

Summer bulbs, which go in when the soil warms in spring, can be the easiest and most satisfying way to give your garden a hit of exotic color and fragrance during the hottest months of the year. Now is the time for gardeners in most parts of the country to make plans for and order summer bulbs, in order to get them in the dirt in April or May.

A slide show of the plants, garden, and architecture of a classic Beverly Hills home.

Not since the likes of Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors has their been a botanical diva like Lois, the Corpse Flower, in Houston. One might call her the Snooki of the plant world, with a giant poof and an attitude even stronger than her smell. We chat with Lois, who gained her fame with her stink and her Twitter stream last year, about how life—now that her 15-minutes of fame is over—has been treating her. We discover that this Titan arum has still got her groove on.

The mythologized coco-de-mer (Lodoicea maldivica) tree is a Seychelles Island native palm, and yields the largest seeds (weighing up to 30 kg) in the plant kingdom. The seeds also happen to resemble a woman's curves.