Creating a reliable food system calls for a shift of priorities from efficient and as cheap as possible to reliable and local. It needs to be about reliability and nourishment. The big threat is lack of pollination services. To protect the pollinators we must plant native plants and protect habitat.
Showy Star of Persia (Allium christophii, aka A. albopilosum) is a garden star. It's a Goldilocks plant - not too tall, not too short, with easy-to-hide foliage, just the right-sized flowering globes - and pizzazz to spare.
I've been making a game of seeing how long I can go without going to the grocery store. That means not just living in the garden, but living on what grows in it.
In this season of rapidly emerging garden weeds, Doug Tallamy's recently published Nature's Best Hope really got me thinking about how subjective and value-skewed the word "weed" is. We want plants with wildlife value but get tripped up with words that carry a lot of baggage. The common definition of weed as a plant out of place is subject to all sorts of interpretations. It depends on your point of view.
After such a mild winter, my 'Brandywine' strain hellebores (Helleborus x hybridus 'Brandywine' ™) are especially lovely. Time to give these Lenten roses, aka Oriental hellebores, center stage. Even my cut-leafed stinking hellebores (Helleborus foetidus) look pretty good this spring.
As we all know, iconic, fascinating, beautiful (and seriously threatened) monarch butterflies are milkweed specialists. So how do monarch butterflies find milkweed plants? Read how to design gardens for maximum monarch butterfly benefit.
February's Connecticut Flower & Garden Show comes at just the right time for plant-lovers eager for spring. The speakers and landscape displays get better every year. Highlights from the 2020 show.
What a difference being outdoors in a warm, green plant-filled environment makes to a winter-weary spirit! Walking and gawking at the tropical (and subtropical) abundance in the funky, small-scale neighborhood of Pass-a-Grille Beach, squished between Boca Ciega Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, in St. Petersburg, Florida is a treat. In this climate, things just grow and every yard is a garden.
I love watching songbirds gobble down bugs and berries on the staghorn sumacs planted outside my front window and listening to owls whoo-ing nearby at night. But some wildlife - voles - have worn out their welcome by eating plants and tunneling through gardens. How do I establish self-sustaining wildlife-friendly plant communities when the wildlife keeps eating my plants? Voles and mice play an important role in ecosystems - but I want them out of my garden.
Who is curb appeal for? Why not appeal to wildlife and to your own sense of beauty instead of having a high maintenance cookie cutter suburban landscape?