One of the best resources for making wise plant picks in Pennsylvania gardens is the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Gold Medal Plant Program. Each year, a panel of regional plant experts gets together to hash out what are some of the best trees, shrubs, evergreens, and perennial flowers that deserve greater use in our […]
The Philadelphia Flower Show is going to happen in 2021, but for the first time in the show’s 192-year history, it’ll take place outside. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic prompted the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which produces the show, to rethink what’s always been an indoor show – long taking place in late winter. […]
The National Garden Bureau, the non-profit education and marketing organization that came into being during the original World War I “Victory Garden” surge, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, the group surveyed nearly 2,000 gardeners and green-industry professionals to get a feel for what’s on gardeners’ minds – […]
Most plants have fairly pleasant names, such as love-in-a-mist, moonflower, glory-of-the-snow, and sweet william. Then there are those with such disgusting or beastly names – bladder fumitory (a poppy-family annual) comes to mind – that you wonder why anyone would plant them. Here’s my list of 10 of the worst-named plants… […]
Books make ideal holiday gifts for gardeners since a.) there’s always something new to learn, and b.) there’s never a shortage of new titles. 2020 brought us four particularly good reads involving remarkable gardens and the gardeners who created them – and in two cases, special gardens left behind. Whether there’s a […]
So here we are into the second week of November, and the temperatures are still pushing 70 degrees. Since much of the Harrisburg area just missed that brush with frost the last week of October, the annual flowers and summer vegetables are still chugging along at this historically late point of the season. […]
A surprising twist happened this year on the way to a pandemically doomed gardening season. It actually turned out to be one of the best years ever for plant sales. Everybody from seed companies to garden centers to landscapers are reporting banner years – some of them record years. It seems […]
A pollinator garden was one of the first gardens built at the fledgling Penn State Arboretum, located at the northern edge of the university’s main campus. But the new and greatly expanded Pollinator and Bird Garden that’s now under construction is one that Arboretum Director Kim Steiner says will be unlike anything you’ll […]
Back when so many homes had exposed concrete-block walls, the first order of landscaping business was to plant evergreens the whole way around the foundation. The dark-green, hard-to-kill, soft-needled yew bush usually got the assignment. Box- and ball-shaped yews are so common around mid- to late-20th-century Pennsylvania houses that it seems as […]
New plants often look like they’re having a near-death experience almost as soon as we put them in the ground. They’ll wilt, yellow, turn brown around the leaf edges, and maybe even drop leaves and needles, scaring us into thinking we’ve killed the poor things right off the bat. And that sometimes […]