I like Jacob's ladder plant most for its foliage. I like to juxtapose it with plants whose leaves have a coarser texture, to achieve contrast. It also doesn't hurt that the most common types of Jacob's ladder have blue flowers, blue being a highly valued color amongst gardeners.

The common name derives from the appearance of Jacob's ladder's leaves: They are compound, composed of numerous opposite, small, narrow leaflets -- like the rungs on a ladder. But "ladder plant" was, presumably, dismissed in favor of a more colorful name. Instead, the most famous ladder in literature was evoked: Jacob's ladder, a vision Jacob saw in a dream as related in Genesis 12-19: "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven...."

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Most actors aspire to have the word "versatile" appear in their epitaphs. Thus their fear of being "typecast," even though the latter term is a supreme compliment in many ways: It says, "You played the role of X so well that I can't believe you could possibly be Y or Z, too."

In this sense, products aren't so dissimilar to actors. It would a nice tribute to a product for it to become so intimately associated with fulfilling such and such a function that we end up not being able to dissociate it from said function. The pitfall here, though, is that such a strong association will blind us to its other virtues.

That's a potentially serious pitfall with a product such as a lawn mower. Consumers demand multiple virtues from their lawn mowers, including some combination of the following:

• Power
• Ease of start-up
• Convenience
• Affordability

Toss factors such as how clean a lawn mower is to work with and/or how "green" it is, and you can see just how versatile a lawn mower has to be to win broad approval.

So would a name like "Eco Mower" threaten to typecast a lawn mower excessively? It would be a shame if that were to be the case with the Lehr Eco Mower. Read my review to find out why this versatile lawn mower doesn't deserve to be typecast as merely "green."

Read review: Lehr Eco Mower

'Miss Ruby' is one of the relatively new butterfly bushes on the market. The shrub is named for its floral color, which is a rich, deep pink. The individual blooms nestle into the flower spike like so many tiny rubies.

Frankly, I'm surprised the namers of 'Miss Ruby' butterfly bush didn't call it 'Ruby Tuesday,' instead (although there is already a Helenium plant named 'Ruby Tuesday'). That way, whenever I thought about the plant, the Rolling Stones song by the same name would have been stuck in my head. Not to sound paranoid or anything (Who, me?), but the plant namers do that sort of thing all the time, to torment me....

Why do you think they named a certain shrub 'Moonshadow' euonymus? Every time I pass by that plant in my garden, I get the old Cat Stevens song stuck in my head. Then there's the new rose of sharon cultivar called 'Blue Chiffon.' What American TV-viewer from the '70s could say that name without immediately hearing a little voice in one's head singing, "If you think it's butter, but it's not..."? It's amazing what one can summon from the caverns of one's memory....

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You have to love hydrangeas. I don't know where my summer landscape would be without their puffy flower heads. And the beauty of the hydrangea flower head is that, being composed mainly of sepals, it lasts for a long time.

I'm a pretty lazy gardener, so it's not surprising that I've never tried any of the fancy methods for drying hydrangea flower heads. I've never even thought about trying any of them, really. I'm content to let the flower heads dry naturally -- right on the hydrangea plant, itself. Sure, they do turn brown; but in my opinion, they're still attractive in that color.

But if you're more ambitious in such matters than I am, you can use the "water drying" method, described in this article on how to dry hydrangea flower heads by Marie Iannotti, About.com's Guide to Gardening. Water-dried hydrangea flower heads will retain their "peak" color (if picked at the right time), rather than browning.

Related resource: Hydrangeas