George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Why Needled Evergreens Get No Respect

August 12th, 2025

   Needled evergreens take a back seat to flowers, flowering shrubs, and pretty much every other aspect of the summer landscape.

Weeping Alaska-cedar

   These landscape staples are often considered little more than “backdrop plants” or necessary additions to keep the yard from looking completely bare in winter.

   Color-lovers diss them for being plain green all year long. They look the same in July as they do in May or November or March.

   Add to that the fact that most yardeners tend to stick with the same few boring choices – then shear them into production-line boxes and balls, i.e. “green meatballs – and it’s no wonder needled evergreens get such little respect.

   Yeah, most needled evergreens play more of a supporting role than star of the show in the peak of the growing season. But these important plants do more and offer more than their reputation conveys.

   Consider:

   1.) Most needled evergreens are some of the drought-hardiest plants around. They may not need any water once they’re established. Needles lose far less moisture in a hot summer than big-leafed plants like hydrangeas and maples.

   2.) They’re not just a green family. Needled evergreens come in versions that have blue needles, gray needles, golden needles, and two-toned variegated needles.

   3.) They come in many different forms and sizes, making them versatile in a wide range of design situations. Columnar upright junipers, for example, make excellent “sentinel” plants flanking doorways. Western arborvitae are a classic, fast-growing choice for a privacy screen. Hinoki falsecypress, weeping Alaska-cedar, dwarf cryptomeria, and numerous other dwarf conifers make superb specimens and foundation plants. A few well placed spruce or fir trees can make a heat-bill-lowering winter windbreak. And spreading junipers, Russian cypress, and prostrate Japanese plum yews are some of the best weed-choking plants for low-care groundcovers.

   4.) If you’re careful when picking sizes or stick with dwarf varieties, needled evergreens need little to no pruning. That’s especially true if you like the looser style that’s now in vogue as opposed to a neatly trimmed formal look.

   5.) Other than yews and eastern arborvitae, most needled evergreens are low on the list of plants that deer bother. Firs, junipers, spruce, pines, and cryptomeria are some of the best options for gardening in deer country.

   6.) Although needled evergreens look pretty much the same all year, that trait comes in handy after fall’s first frost when most everything else in the landscape goes brown and/or bare for five months.

   In short, needled evergreens offer the low-care, four-season look that so many gardeners say they want.

   Most nurseries carry more evergreen choices than you might think. The problem is that gardeners tend to buy what they know, and what they know is often limited by what they see everybody else growing. When it comes to needled evergreens, that boils down to those meatball yews around the house, bagworm- and deer-riddled eastern arborvitae along the border, and a diseased Colorado blue spruce in the front yard.

   No wonder so few are eager to beef up this type of planting when that’s what they know of it.

   The good news is that some of the nicest, good-looking needled evergreen choices are also some of the best performing, most pest-resistant, and least deer-prone.

   Just because they’re not as familiar doesn’t mean they’re bad choices.

   If you could use some evergreen reinforcements, here are 14 that rank high on my list:

10 Plants I Just Can’t Grow

July 29th, 2025

   Every gardener has them… those obstinate plants that just won’t grow for you no matter what you do or where you plant them.

I wish I could grow a mountain laurel that looked like this.

   It’s especially maddening when others seem to have no trouble growing a particular plant, but the same thing seems bent on dying when you plant it.

   Sometimes these plants really are just picky about where they’ll grow. If you don’t give them exactly what they want and need, they respond by croaking.

   But other times it seems like Murphy’s Law or some other mysterious dark force of nature is at work, as if to keep gardeners humble.

   Your list of can’t-grow plants is probably different from mine, but for your commiserating pleasure, here are my top 10 recurrent failures.

1.) Mountain laurel

   This one is the easy top-of-the-list choice. Yeah, mountain laurel is Pennsylvania’s state flower, and they’re beautiful in bloom, but I’ve killed every attempt despite babying them and doing everything supposedly right.

   I’ve concluded that mountain laurel is just dead set on growing in nature where its seeds land and where the soil, light, and moisture is just right. These don’t seem to like being transplanted, and they especially don’t like the lousy clay and subsoil that so many gardeners have.

   I don’t think this one is just me, though. In the hundreds of home gardens I’ve seen over the years in my design travels, I can count maybe a handful of even halfway-healthy mountain laurels.

How to Nurse a Young Plant through a Hot First Summer

July 15th, 2025

   It’s not easy being any plant in the deer-infested, clay-endowed, erratic-weathered, lanternfly kingdom known as central Pennsylvania.

A hot summer is especially tough on any new or young plant.

   But the going is doubly tough if you’re a young plant facing the middle of one of our summers.

   A Harrisburg July and August can throw all kinds of extra challenges at a botanical newbie – killing or stunting plants that don’t get adequate coddling from their gardener-parent.

   Tops on the threat list is dry soil, which can happen breathtakingly fast when the temperatures go up, when nature’s rain spigot shuts off, and when a hot breeze blows.

   Soil moisture is the essence of life for a plant.

   Some plants can go longer without it than others, but all need it sooner or later before they wilt, drop their leaves, and/or die.

   New plants are particularly vulnerable because of their under-developed roots. They simply don’t have the straw power that a bigger, more mature plant has to draw the soil moisture that might be available deeper and wider.

   New plants also are undergoing the shock of adapting from the ideal nutrition, protected environment, and friendly potting mix of nursery care to the harsher condition of your yard.

   It can be a downright cruel transition, too, especially if the insults include a ride home in the hurricane-force winds of an open pickup bed, being planted too deeply into brick-grade clay, and smothered in excess mulch.

   Young plants with their tender leaves and branches also are prime targets of parched, hungry mammals. A few choice chomps by a deer or groundhog, and the plant is a goner.

   With all of those potential pitfalls under their belt, it’s no wonder young plants have such a high summer death toll.

   Sometimes these deaths are quick and obvious. But other times the combination of summer heat and lack of water can lead to more subtle and delayed damage.

   Plants may hang in there despite summer suffering, only to turn into a no-show or a leafless, lifeless candelabra of bare sticks the next spring.

   In those cases, winter or critters or bad soil or disease get the blame when it really was summer root dieback that set the stage for some other finishing blow.

   So what can a nurturing gardener do to head off this scenario – and keep from wasting precious garden-center dollars?

Are Bugs Driving You Buggy in the Garden?

July 1st, 2025

   I’ve long battled animal pests and weather assaults in my annual quest to grow intact vegetables, but one common problem that’s never vexed me much is one that plagues a lot of other veggie gardeners this time of year – bugs.

Potato beetles are a common sight on potato plants in summer.

   Garden bugs can be a big problem and do a lot of damage. However, in my yard, they’re at worst an occasional annoyance – not a deal-breaker.

   I chalk it up to some advice I gleaned 30 years ago while interviewing Paul Keene, then the owner of one of America’s first organic farms, Walnut Acres, a 589-acre organic farm in the rolling hills of Snyder County.

   Keene’s “secret” was that if you interfere with nature as little as possible and try to mimic what nature does, everything falls into place on its own. Despite no spraying, the farm had almost no pest bugs and very little plant damage.

   I remember Keene challenging me to “go ahead and look. Try to find a bean beetle.”

   There were none.

   The fields of corn, tomatoes, cabbage, beets, peas, beans and zucchini were some of the healthiest I had ever seen – all without a drop of any chemical bug-killer, weed-killer or disease-killer in half a century.

   “We really have very little trouble with bugs,” Keene explained. “You might see one here or one there, but it’s no big problem.”

   It wasn’t always that way. When Keene and his wife, Betty, first moved to Walnut Acres at the end of World War II, they were greeted by a familiar array of garden pests.

   But rather than reach for the spray as was more “fashionable,” Keene stuck with the game plan that attracted him to a farm in rural Pennsylvania in the first place.

   Weaned on the teachings of contemporaries J.I. Rodale, founder of Rodale Press and Organic Gardening magazine, and Sir Albert Howard, often called the “father of composting,” Keene decided that toxic chemicals would upend nature’s balance and ultimately do more harm than good. In other words, less is more.

   “The remarkable thing to me was how the insects just seemed to disappear,” Keene said. “When we first came, we couldn’t even grow squash. Borers would get them every time. Then one day I remember saying, ‘You know, Betty, we don’t have squash vine borers anymore.’’’

Tropicals for Pennsylvania Summer Gardens

June 17th, 2025

   The heat and humidity of a typical Harrisburg summer is enough to make it seem as if we’re living in the tropics.

A clump of black-leafed tropical elephant ears adds a focal point to a bed near my back door in summer.

   If that’s the case, we may as well grow with the flow.

   Plenty of tropical plants do nicely here as summertime in-ground, landscape plants. They think they’re at home.

   Yet most northern gardeners limit their use of tropicals to houseplants or, at best, in summer pots alongside the petunias and geraniums.

   Hardly anyone here sticks a croton or a copper plant in the ground.

   Actually, most so-called “houseplants” grow well in our May-to-September landscapes.

   Two caveats:

   1.) If you plan to keep tropicals more than one season, you have to dig them and pot them for inside storage once the late-season temperatures dip into the low 40s.

   Frosts and near frosts will kill most tropical natives. But most are up to double-duty as winter houseplants before going back outside the following May.

   Note: Hose off or spray your tropicals after repotting so you don’t take bugs into the house.

   2.) Be careful about light. Even a tropical that prefers full sun can wash out in color or drop leaves if it goes directly from inside to full sun outside.

   The solution is to acclimate the plant to increasing outside light over a seven- to 10-day period or to plant it outside in shade or part shade.

   Tropicals actually appreciate going into warm, real soil where their roots are free to roam. You may notice them thrive like never before.

   Life in a pot is stunting. Species sold as houseplants are good at tolerating that, but none of them prefer it.