A fair number of south-central Pennsylvania homes have little to no landscaping. A majority have passable to middling plantings – enough to “fit in” or at least avoid being neighborhood embarrassments. Then there are the glorious few where the ambitious owners were bit by the plant bug and ended up building truly […]
I’ve always had doubts about meadows. Proponents of this buckshot-planted, multi-species idea tout meadows as an exceptionally low-care way to cover a lot of ground colorfully while being friendly to pollinators and the ecosystem. The cynical side of me pushes the too-good-to-be-true button and wonders whether weeds will be the ultimate winner. […]
I’ve seen a big shift these last few years in what gardeners view as the “best,” or at least the “desired,” way to garden. The trend is strongly toward a natural look in which lots of different plants intermingle and grow in laissez-faire masses – similar to how plants grow in the wild. […]
Flower color is one of nature’s most joyous gifts to people. Even non-gardeners appreciate it, while many a gardener strives to load the yard with a nonstop parade of flower power from the season’s first hellebores to the last Montauk daisy petal of fall. That’s not easy. More color means more […]
If the Dutch Floriade 2022 is correct, plants in the future will do way more than make our yards pretty or supply us with fresh salads. Tomorrow’s plants could fuel our cars, insulate our roofs and walls, and serve as building blocks for everything from cheese to bridges. The theme of this […]
The lackluster color we see (or don’t see at all) in so many yards up to this point in the growing season is largely because we’re under-bulbed. Spring blooming bulbs like tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths are the leading way to color our spring landscapes, but the majority of yards I see are totally […]
Any day is a good day to be in a garden so far as I’m concerned, but for “normal” people, there’s no better time than the next few weeks. May’s weather is usually warm but not yet into hot, and so much of the plant world here has decided that late spring is […]
Soon after my daughter – then a junior in high school – left for a year-long exchange program living in the Netherlands, I found myself spending a lot of time in a particular corner of my back yard. I’d go back to this shaded far corner under a wild black cherry tree and […]
One of the keys in Nicole Burke’s “Kitchen Garden Revival” strategy is grouping different vegetables into their plant families. Nicole says that when she first started gardening, like so many other beginners, she was overwhelmed at the thought of how to grow the many different plants. Her “ah-ha” moment came when she […]
Once a year in May, the plant-loving residents of the Portuguese island of Madeira go wild with flowers and stage an event called the Madeira Flower Festival, which features flower-filled parade floats and sidewalks that are carpeted with cut blooms. It’s a great place for any flower-lover to be on a warm spring […]