Fall color is one of the great highlights of the year. Tourists come from around the world to see the colors of eastern North America, and almost everywhere, as the summer comes to an end, our gardens pulse with the brilliance of maples and oaks. In older, larger gardens, there is always room for a large shade tree, but in today’s modern, smaller gardens, such...
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If you can only grow one citrus tree, the lemon is the ideal choice. It takes a lot of oranges to make a pint of juice, and not everyone loves grapefruit, which anyway grow on a large tree. But one lemon goes a long way, and if you only have room for a tree in a pot, then a lemon tree will give you enough...
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When most people think ‘boxwood’, they picture clipped balls or low hedges. But there is so much more to boxwood. This is an ideal time to plant some, so it’s also the perfect moment to think about other ways of using this versatile and attractive evergreen. Leave Boxwood Unclipped Some gardeners avoid boxwood, thinking it needs constant clipping, so that is the first myth to...
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When you move into a new home, especially a newly-built home, the garden is often left, while you settle into the house. That is only naturally, but there are two things that you should try to do as soon as possible. One is planting hedges, and the second is planting one or more shade trees. Why? Simply because these garden features take time to grow,...
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The Butterfly Bush, once a favorite plant with children for the hordes of beautiful butterflies it attracts, has had some bad publicity in the last few years. Beautiful as it is, these plants produce a lot of seed, and this will easily spread and grow just about anywhere. In some parts of the country it grows where it is not wanted, and interferes with the...
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Gardeners fall into two camps when it comes to evergreens – those that love ‘em, and those that hate ‘em. Some people find them boring, since they don’t flower, and mostly keep their leaves all year, with little color change as the seasons pass. Others love them for exactly the same reasons – they give permanent privacy, and provide a stable backdrop to the seasonal...
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Everyone loves Japanese maples, with their diversity of leaf color and form. Some are upright, some weeping, while some cascade elegantly over rocks and walls. Leaves may be green, or the coveted rich-reds that are always so popular. Their fall coloring is also varied and spectacular. Some have attractive seed clusters hanging from their bare branches, or brightly-colored twigs glowing in the winter sunlight. A...
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Planting shrubs is the best way to create form and structure in your garden, and working with a selection of different ones, both evergreen and deciduous, and large and small, is the way to create variety too. Getting the balance right, between mass planting and individual specimens, using different heights, and with different foliage types, is the key to creating a garden that looks good...
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Now that spring is behind us, and summer has officially begun, don’t leave the pruning of your spring-flowering shrubs any longer. Ideally it should be done immediately after they flower, so for next year, make a note. However, ‘better late than never’, so if you didn’t do it yet, bring it to the top of your list. There is often confusion about pruning, and many...
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It sometimes seems that garden writers are obsessed with the ‘off’ seasons in the garden. There are endless blogs on flowers for spring, color in fall, how to have winter interest, but summer seems to be forgotten. Yet that is the time when almost everyone is in their garden, enjoying a vacation at home, barbecuing, throwing parties, and having family gatherings. So surely that is...
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When organizing the layout of plants in your garden, making the best and most exciting arrangement you can is the key to making the ordinary look extraordinary. Most plants are basically rounded, and the eye tends to pass quickly over them. What gets our attention is vertical lines. There are quite a few plants that are upright, and even narrow, but there are some that...
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Almost every garden has shade – and even if it begins as sunny, once trees and large shrubs develop, shady areas are almost inevitable. We can treat shade in two ways, as a problem, or as an opportunity. Once we see it as an opportunity to grow plants that prefer or even require shade, a whole world opens up to us. Once we start looking...
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Bringing living green inside your house is a great way to improve your indoor space. Not only do plants add that special something to your rooms, softening the sharp angles of furniture, and filling corners effectively, but multiple studies have shown their amazing ability to remove polluting chemicals from the air. With plants in it, the air inside your home will be cleaner, and be...
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When we look at the huge range of different trees and shrubs available for our gardens, we take it as a given that something new is always coming along – the latest variety of rose, like the arrival of the Knockout Rose, or the exciting twice-blooming Encore Azaleas. Like the latest models of our phones and computers, we see this as a normal thing, and...
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When choosing plants for the garden, the words shade-tolerant, or grows in shade are regularly seen. The true situation with shade is a little more complicated than that, and a better understanding of the various kinds of shade found in gardens is helpful in making good choices, and avoiding costly failures. Let’s think about the different kinds of shade, and their impacts on the growth...
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In colder areas, spruce trees are a common sight, and they are widely used in landscaping. Despite their beauty, the fact that they are so widely used can make them slightly boring options. Their value as screens or specimens can certainly not be underestimated, but sometimes we yearn for something different. If you are looking for a hardy, attractive specimen evergreen for a lawn, or...
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At this time of year, we look anxiously for the beginning of spring, especially those of us who live in cold areas, where April is merely the month when all the snow finally disappears. We might take a walk around our neighborhoods and see plants in bloom, but when we come back through the gate our own gardens can be sadly lacking. If that sounds...
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The succession of flowering shrubs through the seasons is a large part of the beauty of a garden, bringing interest to every part of the year. Yet in many gardens the shrubs are overgrown, and often flower poorly because of incorrect pruning. A little understanding can go a long way to help that, and it is not difficult. Like many things, once we grasp the...
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Camellias are the aristocrats of the garden. They stand majestic, wrapped in rich green and glossy leaves all summer, and then when winter comes they burst into bloom, bringing exotic forms and rich colors to the garden when most other flowers have finished blooming. By choosing several varieties, it is possible to have camellias in bloom in your garden from fall to spring, in an...
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Let’s be honest, roses have a reputation for being difficult. While most people love those big blooms, especially from the flower shop, growing them in gardens has faded from a high-point reached perhaps 50 years ago. As the world got busier, people had less time for their gardens, less time for the detailed pruning and care required, and for the spraying for pests and diseases....
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Hedges are important garden features, for privacy, shelter and appearance. Evergreen hedges are always the most popular, since they give protection 365 days a year, and often the need is greatest in the winter, just when a deciduous hedge is bare and open. That doesn’t mean deciduous hedges are not a good choice in many locations, and they are great for dividing up the interior...
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As the warmer weather arrives, and our plants start to show signs of waking from their winter sleep, we start to wonder how to get the best from them in the coming season. Many flowering shrubs – and trees too – benefit from pruning to stimulate the best display of flowers for our pleasure, but new gardeners can be very confused about what to do....
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Finding enough room in your garden for all the plants you want to grow can be a challenge. As well, many gardens have large blank walls of wood, brick or stone, or fences around the property. These tend to be forgotten when planning the garden, but they offer lots of interesting opportunities for growing plants. These walls and fences can also be unattractive, so putting...
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Spring is the great highlight of the gardening year, always with a profusion of color, scent and interest from all kinds of flowering plants. Just when exactly that great moment arrives depends on where you live and what kind of weather we have had. There is a way to encourage spring to arrive as soon as possible, and that is to grow some of the...
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