Are you ready for a garden of un-earthly delights?    Something to scare away the ghouls and goblins lurking around the garden?  Plant these spooky plants for a garden that will scare even the bravest of trick or treaters.   Here are our favorite creepy plants.  What are yours?  Visit the aHa! Modern Living Facebook Fan Page, and add your favorite scary plant pictures for everyone to see.

Ghoulish Garden Plants

The cackle of witches is the most spooky of sounds, so every Halloween garden needs a Witchhazel.  This plant is an understory shrub that blooms in either the fall or spring, depending on the species that you plant.  It is hardy from Zone 4 to Zone 8.  Cultivars that lose their leaves during the winter are the nicest for gardeners, because the leaf loss allows you to see the small, delicate flowers more easily.

A plant that can suck the life out of any garden in which it grows?  Bloodgrass, Imperata cylindrical, is as scary as vampires, in some parts of North America.  It will take over and spread like a zombie weed, so it is best to just admire pictures of it, rather than planting it in your garden.

Jangling bones and black eyes are native to swampy meadows along the coast.  Be careful if you run through the marsh at night.  You might be chased by Boneset, or Eupatorium perfoliatum.  You can plant this perennial wildflower in your moist, well-drained garden in full sun.

Ghost plants,  Graptopetalum paraguayense, will lend an other-worldly glow to your garden, in the day or the night.

Spiderflower, or Cleome, is a perfect start to the Halloween garden.  What’s Halloween without spooky spiders?  To boot, this plant also has vicious sneaky spines along its stem.  It flowers all summer, until frost, and prefers full sun to part shade.  It is an annual that re-seeds like crazy, so BEWARE!

Bat Plant, or Tacca chantrieri, grows as a houseplant in most of North America.  It blooms during the fall, perfect for Halloween!  It has a spooky name, and it looks scary, too!

Why decorate with lights and fake spider webs when you can plant a garden of scary delights?

Tags: fall gardening, Halloween plants

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Garden, Holiday Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.