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…

It would be hard to find a flowering tree more spectacular than the Flowering Cherry. Every year, at around this time in spring, the streets and parks of many of our cities burst into vibrant color with the flowering of these spectacular trees. Nothing comes close to the density of flowers and the intensity of color, from snowy-white, through pinks, and into deep rosy-reds. Perhaps…

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 season. Too often, though, the reality falls short of our vision, and we instead find a tired collection of unhappy plants, with a few sporadic blooms – hardly what we had in…

Say ‘Magnolia’ to a southerner and their mind conjures up images of huge white blossoms like dinner plates, and big evergreen trees with glossy foliage. Say it to a northerner and they see tulip-shaped pink or purple blossoms on bare branches in early spring. What is the connection, and which one should you be growing in your own garden? Let’s meet the Magnolias. Magnolia trees…