The Garden In August
The peak month of summer is also the pivotal month in the gardening year. Although a tradition has developed that puts spring as the time to get your garden going, a far better…
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Two Level Rose Growing – What a Display!
Everyone loves roses, and it is impossible to have too many in your garden. Except for the work, right? If you think that way you probably grew roses a while back, because a…
Insect Pests of Pine Trees
Pines – big and small – were the subject of a recent blog, and they are beautiful trees that bring a unique look to any garden, with so many to choose from. Pine…
July in the Garden
When July rolls around, that first flush of spring flowers is over, and even some of the early summer plants are finished too. If you haven’t planned ahead you may be looking at…
Grow Your Own Nuts
When we think of ‘home grown’, it is usually vegetables, or fruit, that most people think of. Yet there is a valuable food – nuts – that is often overlooked. Yet nut growing…
Junipers – Tough and Rugged Evergreens
Junipers can be confusing plants when you first start gardening. Someone will casually say, “It’s a juniper” when pointing at almost anything from a tall tree or a narrow, upright shrub, to something…
Deadheading – the Secret to Better Flowering Shrubs
We all want the best plants in our gardens – healthy bushes covered in flowers that bring color and often perfume for us to enjoy. Yet sometimes we are disappointed. A bush produces…
Understanding the Cypress Trees
In everyday talk around our gardens, we often talk about cypress trees, but that name seems to cover many trees that look very different from each other. So what is going on with…
What to Do in Your Garden in June
When you start gardening, the biggest lesson is knowing what to do when. Good timing gives you plenty of blooms in their seasons, and makes planting go smoothly, with plants developing quickly. It…
Kick Start Your Garden this Spring
In a perfect world we would walk out into our spring gardens and be surrounded by beautiful flowering shrubs and trees, with a lush, green lawn, and the promise of another perfect gardening…
Design Your Garden – Part 3
In this series of blogs, we have been looking at a different approach to designing your garden. Forget about drawing plans, and work instead right on the ground, thinking out your garden right…
What is Foundation Planting?
In the extended plant descriptions and advice which are a unique feature of The Tree Center website – and a great resource for our customers – we often describe a plant as being…
7 Top Tips for Spring Clean Up in the Garden
Once warmer weather returns, and the days start to grow longer, the garden tempts up back into it, after a winter of rest, perhaps buried beneath snow. The early-spring garden can look sad,…
Shrubs for Planters, Pots and Boxes
With the gardens of new homes getting smaller and smaller, and particularly with more and more of us living in town homes and apartments, there is a lot of interest in growing plants…
Design Your Garden – Part 2
A couple of weeks back we started talking about designing your garden – something people often want to do in spring. If you read that first part – and if you didn’t, you can…
Design Your Garden – Part 1
With winter drawing to a close in most parts of the country – and flowers already showing on early bloomers in the south – it seems like a good time to put some…
Growing Encore Azaleas in Pots
Encore Azaleas, with their continuous flowering from spring to fall, have become THE most popular azalea in warmer states, displacing the older types, that only flower in spring. Not only are the Encore…
White in the Garden
Planting up your garden is a big project, depending of course on how big your garden is, and how complex you want it to be. Along with choosing sizes, shapes, evergreen or deciduous,…
Cypress Trees – The Complete Guide
Introduction Gardeners today have access to a wide variety of evergreen trees, both those with broad leaves and those with needle leaves. These are used in a variety of ways in the garden…
Plants for the Beach
The days are beginning to lengthen, and although we are still in the grip of winter in most areas, spring cannot be far away. Within a few weeks it will be time to…
The Butterfly Bush Debate
Over the last few years there has been an enormous growth in interest in preserving our natural environments. They are under threat from multiple directions, with everything from climate change and logging to…
Plum Yew – a Shade Evergreen You Should Grow
Shade is the gardener’s perpetual problem – just what can I grow in those inevitable shady spots that are found in every garden. Beneath trees or in the shade of buildings, it is…
Native American Holly Trees
Winter is the time when evergreen trees are most noticeable in our gardens, and few stand out more than holly does. These handsome trees and bushes, with their rich-green leathery leaves, bring structure…
Classic Trees for a Japanese Garden
The Japanese style of garden is enjoying huge popularity in the West. Perhaps it’s the huge interest in mindfulness and Zen, the desire for simplicity, or maybe the realization that it is the…
Winter Landscaping Tips
You invest love, energy and money into your garden, so why enjoy it for only part of the year? Winter is a season too, and despite the cold and rain or snow there…
Holly – the Perfect Tree for Christmas
While the perfect Christmas Tree might be a Spruce or Fir, the perfect tree to have growing in your yard at Christmas is a Holly Tree. This classic tree for Christmas is perhaps…
Pick the Right Persimmon
Persimmon fruits have become hot items in the produce department in the last few years. these exotic-looking bright orange fruits, which look a little like a beefsteak tomato, are available in late fall…
Nuts About Pecans? – Then Grow Your Own
These days it seems everyone is talking about – and eating – nuts. The peanut – not a nut at all, but a type of bean – is of course central to American…
Growing Grapes at Home
So you want to grow some grape vines? Perhaps you are interested in making wine, or perhaps you want to enjoy top-quality grapes for the table, picked right from your garden. Perhaps you…
Protect Your Evergreens the Way the Pros Do
Protecting newly-planted trees – especially evergreens – in their first winter is a real issue for gardeners who live in cold parts of the country. Every fall and winter it comes up and…
Black-Leaf Crape Myrtles – A New Look For An Old Favorite
Crape myrtles have been favorites with southern gardeners for a very long time. Their resistance to heat and drought, combined with vibrant flowers produced over a long period, have made sure of that….
An Easy Approach to Planning Your Garden
The layout of your garden is as important as how you decorate inside, but it often doesn’t get the same attention, or budget. Yet the garden is often the main focus of life…
Growing Peaches in Your Garden
Peaches are such luscious fruits, and so delicious to eat, that it seems hard to believe they are also among the easiest of fruit trees to grow, and ideal for smaller gardens, since…
Crab Apples – the Best Flowering Tree for Cold Climates
Spring and flowering trees go together – it wouldn’t be spring without them. But the classic flowering trees like cherry trees and magnolias are hard to grow in colder climates, below zone 5…
Grow Muscadine Grapes – the Best Grapes You Will Ever Taste
If you live outside the South, the chances are your grape-eating experience is limited to the green, seedless grapes sold in supermarkets. If that is so, then you have been missing out on…
Pick Figs from Your Own Garden
Figs hold a special place among the many kinds of fruits we eat. They have a unique quality that goes well with savory foods, especially ham and soft cheeses, or added to salads….
5 Steps to Better Soil for Fall Planting
Now that fall is beginning, this is prime planting season for trees and shrubs. Planted now, rather than in spring, they will establish roots over winter – even in the coldest areas –…
Look Up When You Plant – Trees and Utility Lines
With fall advancing, we are into peak tree-planting season, and all across the country gardeners and home owners are choosing shade trees, ornamental trees, or planning to plant trees to screen their property…
Fall – The Ideal Planting Season
Somehow, over recent years, the gardening year got turned around. Today everyone rushes into their garden at the first sign of spring, and immediately starts planning and planting for the best garden ever….
Are You Growing These Fall Blooming Plants? You Should Be!
We tend to think of garden flowers as something that happens in spring and summer and having blooms at those times is relatively easy. Too many gardens though, are finished by Labor Day,…
Summer Tree Problems – What Counts, and What Doesn’t
There is a cycle to the growth of a garden through the seasons. After the silent wait of winter, spring arrives full of promise. The fresh, new growth of trees and shrubs is…
Time to Plan for Fall Color
Summer is at its height, but the smart gardener is always thinking ahead. Fall will be with us all too soon, and if you want to continue the garden fun and beauty into…
Pick the Right Boxwood
Boxwood shrubs – as hedges of different sizes, clipped shapes or growing naturally – are the backbone of the structure of many gardens. Boundaries and edgings are the easiest way to bring order…
Diseases of Crape Myrtles
Crape Myrtles (Lagerstroemia) are very popular shrubs for warmer areas, and no wonder. They have spectacular blooms for an extended period, grow well in poor soil, and are heat and drought resistant. They…
Why We Stake Trees
Planting a tree is always a great moment – most trees have longer lives than we do, and although a newly-planted tree will be a beautiful addition to our gardens after just a…
Meet the True Cedars – the Genus Cedrus
Across most of the country, you will see, and probably have in your garden, cedar trees. The name ‘cedar’ was given by the early settlers to several tall evergreen trees they found in…
Gardening with Ornamental Grasses
It has not been all that many years since grass had only one place in the garden – green and mowed weekly on the lawn. It took some adventurous growers and garden designers…
Groundcover Plants for Shady Places
Shady parts of the garden are often welcome in the summer, as cool refuges from the heat. But most plants don’t find them so welcoming. When we put in a new garden it…
Xeric Gardening – 5 Tips for Using Less Water
There is a big push these days to use less water on our gardens. Periods of drought, limitations on city water supplies, concerns about long-term freshwater availability, and increased costs to home-owners –…
Get the Most from Your Mulch
New gardeners quickly hear about this thing called ‘mulch’, but often all that hear is, ‘mulch regularly’, or ‘use mulch for weed control’ – without getting any real idea of what it is,…