George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Stay at Erin’s Florida Villa

March 22nd, 2016

I never did like the cold, snow and ice (green easily beats white in my color book), but I’m “enjoying” it less as I rapidly age.

Here’s the palm-lined street leading to Erin’s Florida villa.

That’s why my wife, Sue, and I have been trying to shorten winter the last few years by escaping to Florida for a few weeks, like so many other northern snowbirds.

We’ve been renting a townhouse or villa, which come with kitchens, cozy furniture, living rooms and wireless Internet so I can post online while wearing T-shirt and shorts instead of shivers.

From now on, though, we’ll have a place we can call our winter home away from home. Our daughter, Erin, saved her pennies and put a down-payment on a villa just minutes from the entrance to Walt Disney World.

When we’re not hiding out there, Erin plans to rent this cute, 3-bedroom villa in a gated community the rest of the year. (See Erin’s villa website for availability and lots more pictures.)

She picked this area not only because we all happen to be Disney fans (Epcot is my favorite) but because this is the one part of Florida where people rent places all year long.

Here’s the front of Erin’s 3-bedroom villa.

The villa is in a Mediterranean-style community called Tuscan Hills, which is along Route 27 just 7 miles southwest from the less-frenetic Route 192 entrance to Disney.

We were all impressed at first glance at Tuscan Hills. There’s a clay-tiled clubhouse at the front with a large, four-tiered fountain gracing a circular foundation bed. Inside is a comfy lounge with TV, a kitchenette, a games room, and an exercise room with treadmill, bike and weights. It’s free for guest use.

Out back of the clubhouse is a tennis court, a sand volleyball court, a kiddie play area, and lots of palms that remind you that you’re not in frigid Mechanicsburg anymore.

I probably pay more attention to landscaping than the average person, and Tuscan Hills impressed me there, too. Crews were out trimming and planting flowers the day we first visited. It’s all neat and formal in keeping with the Italianate theme.

Not So Bad of a Winter?

March 8th, 2016

Now that the 30 inches of snow is gone and washed into the water table, we’re getting a good look at how our landscape plants fared over winter.

All of that snow is keeping cold wind off of these boxwood leaves.

From what I’m seeing, it looks like things came out in good shape – at least better than the past two cold winters.

Extreme as it was, all of the late-January snow turned out to be good plant insulation. It didn’t seem to tear down a lot of branches or sag a lot of evergreens as ice storms and heavier snows often do. (For more on this, read my Pennlive.com “One Plus to All of the Snow” article from January.)

What it DID do, though (besides cost us $55 million statewide to remove from roads), is protect leaves and tender branch tips from cold winter winds.

Buried under 2 feet of snow, things like hydrangea flower buds and nandina leaves don’t wind-burn or die as they do when exposed to sub-zero wind blasts from a polar vortex.

We got down into the single digits for a little this winter, but we didn’t get hammered by any prolonged super-cold spells.

What worried me more was that incredibly warm December that pushed plants much farther along than they should’ve been heading into January.

Bubble Your Way to a Yard You Actually Use

March 1st, 2016

You paid a lot for that yard of yours.

Here’s a yard that’s used, not just looked at.

So why do you mostly just look at it instead of use it? Wouldn’t you rather enjoy it more and mow it less?

I see this a lot in my Garden House-Calls travels. And I don’t think it’s because people like it that way.

I suspect it’s because we’ve been conditioned to think of our yards as the lawn, and anything else is an alteration or addition to that sacred standard.

Most people limit themselves to the “normal” additions – things like attaching a deck to the back door, planting shrubs in a 4-foot strip around the house foundation, and eventually adding screen plantings along the property lines (usually arborvitae) for a modicum of privacy.

That might be normal, but it’s not very inviting.

It usually leaves you sitting out on a hot deck that seems more like a stage than a retreat.

It leaves you looking at tall, boring, green arborvitae walls fronted by little green blades that keep yelling for you to cut them.

Or if you skip the arborvitae, it leaves you with a 2-inch-tall sea of green that flows anonymously from one yard to the next, making it hard to tell where your yard ends and the next one begins.

Most people don’t find any of that very cozy or comfortable. Something doesn’t “feel” right. The question is, why not? And more importantly, what do you do about it?

Try this while you’re in winter garden-dreaming mode. Rethink your outdoor space the same way you look at the space inside your house.

Wild and Crazy Plants

February 23rd, 2016

Our landscape plants put on a nice show, what with their colorful summer flowers, their flashy fall foliage and their versatile shapes, sizes and textures.

Hollis Garden gardener Stacy Smith shows us the $30,000 frankincense tree.

But head into tropical or subtropical territory, and you’ll find plants that do some wild and weird things.

I’m just back from leading an 8-day tour to see gardens of central Florida, and our group of 39 plant-gawkers ran into some curiosities you don’t see every day in Steelton or New Cumberland. (See my newest Photo Gallery for a look. Or if you’re ever thinking about heading down there yourself, check out the 3-bedroom, pool-equipped villa in a gated community that our daughter, Erin, rents just 15 minutes from the Disney gates.)

We can do many of these plants as house plants or summer annuals. For others, you just have to marvel at how diverse and creative plants can be. Some of the more curious of what we saw…

* The $30,000 frankincense tree. Ever wonder the source of the little fragrant frankincense pellets that date to use in Biblical times? They come from a small-leafed, multi-stemmed tree that isn’t particularly attractive.

The costly pellets result from wounding the branches and drying and collecting the tear-drop-sized sap.

The 6-foot tree we saw is displayed at Hollis Garden – a city-owned garden in Lakeland. It was donated by a gardening citizen who wanted to remain anonymous.

Hollis has a security camera pointed at the tree because it’s so rare and worth $30,000. Nice gift.

Miracle fruits turn our sour taste buds sweet.

* Miracle fruit. This bush (Synsepalum dulcificum) produces small, red, oval fruits that have the odd ability to turn our sour taste buds sweet. For about 20 minutes after you eat miracle fruit, even lemons taste deliciously sweet.

We saw this one at Hollis, too, where head gardener Stacy Smith told us that the plant was banned for years in the U.S. because of sugar-industry lobbying.

The plant is now legal, growable in pots in the North, and available via mail order from Logee’s Greenhouses in Connecticut.

One Less Garden Show

February 16th, 2016

At least for gardeners, the start of garden-show time is the year’s first indicator that spring is around the corner.

This display garden at the 2015 Pa. Garden Expo by Levendusky Landscape may be one of the last.

This year, our earliest “robin” is gone.

The Pennsylvania Garden Expo – the closest-to-home, end-of-winter garden show that’s taken place at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex since 2003 – has been canceled for 2016. It was to have taken place the last weekend in February.

Unless a new operator steps forth, Expo may be gone for good.

That leaves us with the Pennsylvania Garden Show of York on March 4-6 at the York Expo Center; the granddaddy of all garden shows – the Philadelphia Flower Show – running March 5-13 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philly, and if you count the hardscaper/landscaper booths and gardens, the Pennsylvania Home Show, which locals still call the “Builders Show,” scheduled for March 10-13 at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg.

The 3-day Pennsylvania Garden Expo with its display gardens, seminars, and marketplace of vendors was always first out of the gate in late February. It almost died a year ago when Journal Publications, which ran six shows, decided to bow out.

The 2015 Expo happened only when a few past exhibitors who were members of the new Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI) convinced that group to try running it.

But NARI took over only a few months before show time and had a hard time putting together the pieces. The result was a show with only three main display gardens, no major garden-center backing, and a marketplace that had more wineries, snack booths, and home-products vendors than the garden- and plant-related exhibitors that show-goers expected to see.

I was set up at the far end of last year’s show doing seminars, and 10 minutes after the doors opened, a fellow appeared there and asked, “Is this it?”

I thought he meant, “Is this where the talk takes place?” But it turned out that he had walked through the whole show in that time, seen virtually nothing of gardening interest to him, and decided that he wasn’t coming back.