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 […]
Even at big public gardens, butterfly gardens tend to be fairly small, blending into the crowd of different themes. I’ve never seen one with enough wow power to really stand out… certainly not to the point where I left judging a butterfly garden as the best feature in the whole place. Then […]
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 […]
I’ve planted 11 trees at my new place in the last year and a half, and in every case, I bought small ones. Small as in ones in the four- to six-foot-tall range as opposed to the bigger ones that many nurseries also offer. I mention this because it’s a question I […]
For better or worse (mostly for worse), it’s time to rethink how we garden in our new and changing climate conditions. This summer served up a model for what climate researchers and horticulturists say we should get used to in the coming years – warmer winters, earlier springs, hotter/drier summers, increasingly erratic changes […]
This is a classic tale of a good guy turned bad… except the star is a tree instead of a movie villain. It’s about the ornamental or “callery” pear, that hard-to-kill spring beauty that blooms white in yards, parking lots, and along streets all over Pennsylvania and beyond. When it came to […]
Flowers and fall foliage are the two big traits that drive most tree-selection decisions. Interesting bark is an overlooked feature that most people don’t pay much attention to until winter – if even then. In some tree species, though, the bark is arguably the most attractive trait. If you’re looking to […]
Now that I’m into the run-out-of-gas years, I wasn’t planning to plant a lot of spring-flowering bulbs in my new Pittsburgh-area yard. It’s a lot of work, the bulbs cost money that I already spent on brick repairs and a roof, and then there are those dreaded deer that turn beauty into dinner. […]