Choosing a Small Tree for Your Garden
As gardens have become smaller, planting trees has become harder. There is an irony to this, as a time when everyone is being urged to plant more trees, but it is important to…
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Shrubs Beside Water (or in Wet Soil)
One of the most common instructions we find ourselves giving is to grow a certain plant in ‘well-drained soil’. That is fine, but what if you don’t have soil like that, perhaps because…
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…
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,…
Beyond the Mop-Head Hydrangea – Other Types and Species of Hydrangea Plants
Say “Hydrangea”, and most people think of those big, floppy heads of flowers in summer, in pink, white, or blue. That is the big-leaf hydrangea, Hydrangea macrophylla, that came to us from Japan….
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…
Coneflowers – Flowers of the Prairies for every Garden
The prairies are deeply embedded in the American psyche, even for people who live a thousand miles from them. Accounts of settlement and Native American hardship can complicate things, but one thing remains…
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…
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…
Meet the Viburnums – Some Of Our Best Flowering Shrubs
If you want to know the secret to creating an attractive garden, there is a one-word answer – ‘structure’. I don’t mean pergolas and gazebos, but structure from shrubs and small tree. A…
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…
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…
How to Grow Blueberries in Pots
Everyone loves blueberries – they are America’s #2 berry (after strawberries) – and we just love them in muffins and pancakes, in pies and smoothies, scattered over cereal or just popped straight into…
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…
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…
Nothing Says ‘Holidays’ like a Citrus Tree
I’m fortunate. I spent years living in zone 3, but today when I look out my window I see golden balls hanging from a green tree in my small yard. No, I haven’t…
5 Hot Plants for Your Xeric Garden
Who can forget the fires in California? Nature is telling us something, and we need to listen. If the future turns out as dry as it looks now, for big parts of the…
November in the Garden
There are two schools of thought among gardeners about November. One group – perhaps the majority – see it as a time to gaze out on a fading landscape, relishing the special beauty…
How To Grow A Blue Spruce Tree From A Seed
Growing trees from seed is not difficult, and the pleasure of seeing – in just a few years – that thriving young tree that you brought to life, is a great joy, for…
The Perfect Substitute for Boxwood – New Hollies
Boxwood is definitely one of the most iconic garden plants there is. Most people recognize it straight away, and those clipped hedges are a symbol of the organize, formal look for gardens. Start…
Beautiful Trees for Wet Ground
It doesn’t take much looking for plants to meet the dreaded phrase – grow in ‘well-drained’ soil. It sometimes seems like every tree or bush needs these mythic conditions. Look at many gardens,…
Eastern Red Cedar – the toughest Juniper There Is
America was built on the Pioneer Spirit – the ability to persevere in difficult situations, and survive adversity, thriving in the toughest situation. If you want a plant for those situations, it makes…
Bushel & Berry® – a Fantastic New Way for Everyone to Grow Berries
Nothing beats a bowl of berries – fresh, juicy, tangy and sweet – delicious! If you are a berry lover, nothing truly beats the taste of berries fresh from the bush, perhaps still…
Why Does My Holly Tree Have No Berries?
There is no doubt that holly bushes are super-popular, not just for their dense, glossy foliage, but especially for their bright red berries, that brighten the holiday season. Yet in garden after garden…
America’s Very Own Holly Tree
Nothing says “Christmas” like holly. Those iconic deep-green spiny leaves and clusters of bright-red berries might be featured on almost every greetings-card, but their beauty never tires. In the garden too they are…
Why are So Many Trees Called ‘Cedar’?
You know how it goes – a quick trip to the garden center, real or online, for a few plants. You get there and ask for what you want. Now sometimes it’s no…
Everything You Need to Know About Wisteria
Instantly recognizable, the long, hanging blue flowers of the wisteria are a highlight of spring, sometimes blooming as early as March in the south, or May in the north. A good specimen in…
Miniature Roses Come to Town
Most gardeners have some idea of the main groups of rose – hybrid teas, floribunda, climbing roses, and so on – even if with new varieties those old borders have become a little…
How To Prune Your Wisteria
A Wisteria is a gorgeous plant when it is in bloom, a highlight of spring and a truly wonderful sight. But a lot of people buy one and within a few years become…
Growing Roses in Planters and Pots
Roses and summer go together perfectly, and the enduring beauty of these bushes makes them always desirable. They are mostly grown out in the garden, but they also make great container plants, to…
Smoke Trees for Smaller Gardens
Tough, vigorous and beautiful, the Smoke Tree – Cotinus coggygria – has been a reliable garden shrub for a very long time. Whether you go for the original green-leaf version, or the very…
Meet the Maidens – Supremely Beautiful Grasses for All Gardens
Ornamental grasses are hugely popular, but also avoided by some gardeners, who probably have memories of one invasive grass or another that they planted – and came to regret. It is true that…
Double-Acts – Flowering Shrubs with Good Fall Color
Creating a rich and fulfilling garden can be tricky and it takes some thought and planning. There is a basic principle, though, that can really help you build a garden that is interesting…
Growing Peonies – the Belles of the Northern Garden
Southern gardeners have their azaleas, magnolias and camellias, and if you garden in the north you might feel deprived. Don’t, because you too have a plant that rivals and even beats those favorites….
April in the Garden
By April, wherever in the country you live, spring has arrived in some form. In the north it is still tentative, and there may even be persistent patches of snow lying in deep,…
March in the Garden
What happens in your garden in March depends on where you live. In colder zones the answer will probably be, “Broken promises,” with warmer, sunny days that turn cold at night and then…