Compact versions of two popular native plants, three new ornamental grasses with golden blades, and two new dark-leafed flowers top the list of interesting new perennials debuting in the 2022 growing season. Growers, local garden centers, and other plant experts picked the following 14 perennial-flower choices for the annual four-part, best-new-plants series I […]
A new heavy-blooming petunia with petite white flowers, two new flowers you’ve probably never seen before, and the world’s first trailing salvia are among a banner slate of interesting new annual flowers debuting in the 2022 growing season. Growers, local garden centers, and other plant experts picked those and more for the four-part, […]
The COVID-fueled boom in vegetable gardening continued in 2021, and research is showing a high percentage of newbies say they plan to stick with this dirty (but healthy) habit again in 2022. Plant breeders and seed companies are riding the wave by rolling out lots of new edible-plant introductions this year. Let’s […]
Will we stick with it? That’s the big question the gardening industry is wondering after some 18 million new gardeners took to the soil in 2020 as COVID forced people to stay at home. At least so far, the gardening boom is showing no sign of a let-up. Seeds and plants […]
A lot happened on the gardening front in 2021. Pennsylvania banned the sale of barberries, lawsuits prompted the makers of Roundup to phase glyphosate out of the popular kill-everything herbicide, and lots of great new plants debuted in garden centers (although in COVID-related short supply and at higher prices). I thought I’d […]
Have you noticed the huge amount of cones this year on so many of our needled evergreen trees? Spruce trees in particular seem to be loaded with them. What gives? While hefty cone production isn’t a predictor of what kind of winter we’re about to have (as some think), it can […]
If you wonder why Japanese barberries aren’t in garden centers next spring, it’s because Pennsylvania has banned the sale of this popular little thorny-stemmed shrub as a harmfully invasive plant. Japanese barberries have been a landscape staple for decades because they’re heat- and drought-tough, deer don’t like them, they’re compact, they aren’t commonly […]
You might be in Christmas mode this time of year, but it’s not a bad idea to be thinking about ordering seeds for your 2022 garden already, too. For a second year in a row this year, seed companies faced a double whammy of COVID-related, order-filling handicaps and another extra-heavy spike in seed […]
I’ve been digging and planting and caring for plants for more than 40 years now, and in that time I’ve managed to learn a few things about gardening. I thought I’d share the 10 most important… 1.) A garden is never done. Just about the time you think you have a garden […]
Most people use their pots for posies – primarily petunias, geraniums, coleus, and other annuals that get planted each May and yanked each October. Then the pots get tucked away for winter until frost stops knocking at the door the following spring. Hardly anyone uses pots to grow woody plants – i.e. […]