The Pine Trees of America #3
PART 3, THE 3-NEEDLE PINES OF AMERICA In this series of blogs we are taking a deeper look at our native pine trees, both in the wild and in our gardens. In the…
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The Pine Trees of America #2
PART 2, THE 5-NEEDLE PINES OF AMERICA In the first part of this look at our native Pines, we talked about how to identify pine trees with a reasonable degree of accuracy. In…
The Pine Trees of America #1
PART 1, IDENTIFICATION Pine Trees are everywhere, in city and country, and their distinctive long needles make them a tree that is almost as widely recognized as maple. As garden trees, pines have…
Coral Bells, Foam Flowers and Foamy Bells
Once upon a time, boys and girls, Coral Bells were simple plants with marbled leaves and sprays of tiny bright coral-pink flowers on tall stems that fluttered in the breeze. Sometimes you saw…
Twining Plants – Which Way Do They Twine?
Once you start to look a little more closely at plants, and work with them in your garden, you start to notice all sorts of curious things. One that has always attracted a…
Sweet or Sour? What are the different kinds of cherries?
Growing fruit in your own garden is always a thrill, but it does take some effort – more than just picking up a tree at random and planting it. On our site we…
Flower Your Christmas Cactus – Guaranteed!
The Christmas Cactus is also called Holiday Cactus and Thanksgiving Cactus. It’s a familiar sight in the holiday season and through the early part of each year. The unique flowers have whorls of…
How To Prune Panicle Hydrangeas – Hydrangea paniculata
Hydrangeas are among the very best of shrubs for late blooming. Not only do they flower when most other shrubs have finished for the season, but they stay in bloom for weeks and…
Tired of Boring Hedges? – here are some great ideas.
Most gardeners love hedges – formal or informal, they make the perfect background to a garden, defining it’s space, giving privacy and showing off your plants against a neutral background. But why is…
Using Organic Material When Planting Trees & Shrubs
Back when I was a student of horticulture, the use of synthetic chemicals for gardening was widespread. Since then most home gardeners have moved away from them, and for many today they are…
Winter Protection for Rose Trees
Almost everyone loves roses, and with today’s easy-care modern varieties, it’s easy to care for the things you love. Besides the huge number of different varieties, divided into different types – landscape roses,…
The Peach Comes to America
Nothing says ‘summer’ like a ripe peach, but where did this delicious fruit come from, and how has it come to be so ‘American’, when it’s roots can be traced back to ancient…
Everything You Need to Know About Gardening – A Guide to Our Blogs
The end of the year is always a time for reflection, and I am reflecting on my writing over 300 blogs on our site. No world-record, but enough to mean finding your way…
How to Grow Magnolia Trees
Magnolias are without doubt a highlight of the spring. There is something almost unworldly happening when we see those extraordinary blooms standing proudly on the bare gray stems of the tree. Larger than…
The Fabulous Tale of Figs
Figs are the oldest fruit, certainly being eaten many thousands of years ago all around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East. Fresh figs are today the goal of home gardeners, who want…
Overwintering Potted Plants
The clocks have changed, the nights are shorter, and much colder, and maybe there have already been flurries in the air. As winter comes our gardens go to sleep, but if you garden…
Garden Design 101 for Home Gardens
So you want to design your own garden? You don’t need a degree, or years of study to do a good job of it – just a grasp of some basic principles and…
Choosing Screening Trees and Shrubs
Most of us want privacy in our gardens, so we can relax and enjoy ourselves, free from the noise and dust of a highway, the curiosity of passersby, or the scrutiny of neighbors….
How to Create a Garden in the Japanese Style
For many people, the Japanese are the greatest garden-makers in the world. So for many gardeners, creating a Japanese garden is their greatest ambition. Some study the different types of Japanese gardens for…
Some Harmless (but interesting) Garden Pests
I’m sticking with it, but looking back at the title I just wrote for this blog, I see right away a classic oxymoron – if they are ‘harmless’ they can’t be ‘pests’. But…
The New American Garden: A Home-Grown Garden Style
Without realizing it, many of us create gardens in styles that we bring from other countries. This is obvious when you are inspired by Japan or Asia to emulate their beautiful gardens, but…
The English Flower Garden
After our last ‘Garden Styles’ blog on the Classic American Garden, we are going to step outside the US for a moment to look at the most influential garden style of the last…
Garden Styles – the Classic American Garden
For the first style in our series, we will start with a garden look that is seen almost everywhere in the country, but perhaps especially in the east. Houses that are now around…
Garden Styles – How to Get the Garden Look You Crave
In this era of computers, there is an app for everything. When it comes to doing your own design for the garden around your new home, or making improvements to an existing garden,…
Franklin’s Tree – The Amazing Story of a Plant Snatched from Extinction
We hear so much today about extinction and ecosystem collapse, but sometimes, by luck, a plant can be saved – if not in the wild, at least in garden collections, and its gene…
How to Water Your Plants – Part 2, Watering Planters, Pots, Boxes and Indoor Plants
Last week we starting this topic off with some basic principles of water and plants, and some tips on watering in your garden. If you stumbled on this blog without seeing that one,…
How to Water Your Plants – Part 1, Basic Principles and Watering Outdoors
Some of the most common gardening questions revolve around watering. We might think nothing could be easier that pouring some water on your plants, but it doesn’t work out that way. In the…
Meet the Belles of the Bowl – a New Range of Ornamental Strawberries to Enjoy
Growing edible plants in your flower garden is a hot trend right now, and everyone is planting everything from zucchini to potatoes in their beds. We have been doing this for years with…
Ring the Bell for Coral Bells
When they come into our gardens, some plants stay pretty much the same as they are in the wild, but others are changed dramatically by keen growers, who see some potential and go…
Catmints – Great Plants for More than Just Cats
If you have ever seen a cat lost in the ecstasy of rolling around in a plant of catmint, you will know just how attractive these plants are to them. You might then…
Lavandin or Lavender – What’s the Difference?
So you want to grow some lavender, but when you Google for some more information you start seeing this word ‘Lavandin’. Ah, you think, maybe it’s the French name for it? Hm, nice…
Daylilies – the Best Summer Flower for Your Garden
The old-fashioned orange daylily, with its tall stems and narrow orange trumpets, has been grown in gardens for many, many, years. It is often seen in old, neglected ones, or growing along roadsides,…
Grow a Flow of Seasonal Color with Perennial Plants
When you first start gardening, one of the most difficult things is to keep your garden interesting all year round. For most of us that means blooms, although of course fruits, fall color…
The special Story of a Special Plant, the Pillar Hibiscus
The Hardy Hibiscus, or Rose of Sharon, is a shrub that’s familiar to many gardeners. It was once wildly popular but then fell from favor, returning recently with many new varieties. For long-blooming…
Chinese Astilbe – Top Choice for Drier Gardens
Perennial plants add an extra dimension of beauty to any garden, and ones that are pest-free, long-blooming and low-maintenance are the best ones of all. Add in weeks and weeks of summer blooming,…
Let’s Sort Out Jasmines and their Friends
There is nothing new or unique about botanists and ordinary folk having different names for plants. If you look at the plants gardeners call ‘cypress’ you find a whole host of very different…
Growing Peaches on Walls – Espalier Fruit Trees
Who doesn’t love peaches? Melt-in-the-mouth, buttery, sweet and fragrant – nothing beats that bite into a ripe peach, and no ripe peach tastes like one you grew yourself and just picked, still warm…
Shrubs for Exciting Ground Cover
Every garden has spaces beneath the plants where the earth can be seen. These areas attract weeds, and they lose water to the air, drying out your plants faster. They also look boring,…
Kathleen Meserve – the Holly Lady
Plant breeding is one of the few areas where amateur, hobby gardeners have made at least as much of a contribution to the plants we grow as professionals – and sometimes even more….
Neem Oil will Kill Your Garden Pests
When you start growing plants – indoors or outdoors – it doesn’t take long before you see a few creepy-crawlies on them. That isn’t reason to panic, because most insects on plants are…
Louis Boehmer, the Man Who Sent Us Plants From the East
“Never heard of him!”, did you just say? That’ not surprising really, as few people have. But Louis Boehmer was responsible for the arrival in Europe and North America of many of our…
Climate Change and Your Garden
Much of the world has been looking in alarm at recent events in Texas. No lights, heat or water for days for millions of people doesn’t sound like America. We can point the…
Victor Lemoine – the Lilac Man
Especially for gardeners in colder zones, lilacs are classic flowering shrubs no-one would want to be without. Their large heads of fragrant flowers are a delight, and available in a wide range of…
How to Understand The Labels on Your Plant
If you are having trouble knowing what to call that latest plant you just put in your garden, you are not alone. Many gardeners love their plants, and might even see them as…
Trees and Shrubs for Alkaline Soils – Part 2
A couple of weeks back we started this two-parter on choosing plants that will grow well for you if you have alkaline soil. If you are looking for some suitable trees, or are…
5 Ways to Make a Beautiful Garden with White-flowering Shrubs
It doesn’t take long, once you start gardening, to start thinking about color. Yes, it is very important to arrange your beds using interesting shapes – a blend of vertical, rounded and horizontal…
Jean Iseli – King of the Conifers
The world of conifers is an enormous and diverse one, from the many hedges of Green Giant to the tiniest miniature collector’s tree, and from towering redwoods to flat groundcovers – there is…
Trees and Shrubs for Alkaline Soils – Part 1
The Right Plant in the Right Place is a slogan that you will often hear from professional landscape designers and horticulturists. It’s a simple principle, but one often ignored in the rush to…
The Weeping Willow
In today’s global world we can easily make the mistake of thinking that international trade is something new and exciting, that ‘we’ recently discovered. How wrong we would be! The volume may be…
December in the Garden
As the year winds down – and what a year it has been – this is the time to bring things to an end, and also to make new beginnings. We have said…