Pines are certainly the most easily recognized evergreen, with their distinctive long and thin needle-like leaves and large cones. For the garden they offer a wide range of trees and shrubs, that fit into many garden styles, and grow well even in poor, sandy soils. With all that diversity available, there is hardly a garden anywhere that can’t be enhanced with a pine tree, so…

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 is certainly the easiest way to grow edible plants. No elaborate annual bed preparation, seeding and planting, as you do with a vegetable garden. You don’t have to followed detailed pruning methods,…

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 a few inches tall creeping across the ground. It might have fuzzy or smooth leaves, and it could be green, blue, yellow, gold or any combination of those colors. Naturally this is…

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 a few initial flowers and then stops for the rest of the season, or has a good flowering one year, and then little or nothing the next one. Instead of just being…

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 all these ‘cypress’? The name is an old one, going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and was applied to trees that were evergreen, with green branches, but that didn’t have…

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 prevents (or greatly reduces) winter injury and drought problems, and it makes your work much more effective. In different parts of the country there will be, because of climate, variations in timing…