Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

I like this picture for both the tree and for the sky in the background. This is a tulip poplar tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) located in our newly discovered territory. It’s a large tree and suffered some branch die back because of the drought of last summer. The branches were knocked down recently in one of our storms. The tulip poplar…

Coneflowers are a work horse in many gardens including mine, but they aren’t completely issue free. Recently one of my coneflower plants began showing deformed flowers with a complete loss of color in the petals. The petals appeared stunted and pale. In some cases the deformed flowers mimic some new interesting variety of coneflower but it’s not, these are the…

Sometimes there comes along a plant that is just a gardener’s dream. Beautiful during the growing season, native, great for pollinators, great for birds, useful in the landscape, and overall easy to care for. I’ve got you hooked already don’t I? This plant would be a member of one of my favorite groups of plants: the viburnums. Viburnum dentatum aka…

(Time x (Knowledge + Experience) x Money )= Your GardenHow successful is your garden? I think you can tell just by observing the outcome, but there are elements that go into it that effect your desired outcome.Time to me is by far the most important. The amount of time spent planning, weeding, planting, propagating, or even researching play a huge…

New to our garden this year ‘Powis Castle’ artemisia is proving to be a powerful perennial plant for foliage! I’ve always enjoyed artemisias for the silver foliage and really liked the ‘Silver Mound’ artemisia that we put in the front sidewalk garden so once I found this cultivar at a local nursery I thought I would give it a try….

It’s a sure sign of fall when the goldenrod stands tall! These tall golden yellow plumes rise above most of the native grasses in our naturalized side yard. Unfortunately for this beautiful perennial flower it is commonly mistaken for a more insidious vegetative villain, ragweed. When you sneeze in the fall it isn’t goldenrod causing your problems. Ragweed is the…

As autumn’s colors have wrapped us in a cloth of color we have peeked into the foliage around the gardening blogosphere. Participants from Canada to Florida and Illinois to England have offered up wonderful illustrations of fall’s foremost feature. It’s time to take a look back and see where all that fall color came from and where it went! I’ve…

Melinda over at Elements in Time has issued a challenge to bloggers to grow one more thing than they did last year and talk about it each week! I’d probably talk about it anyway but this seemed like a good idea to see what others are doing in their gardens. Go over and check out what it’s all about!

I finally found some Muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) to add to the garden. It’s been on my radar for a while and it was even more desired after seeing it in such impressive displays at Frances’ Garden! Yesterday I planted it in our Japanese maple garden next to the Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light’ that I had already planted. The miscanthus…

Where do I find the seeds for my gardening activities? Lot’s of places! The most obvious location is in a store, either online or one of the old fashioned brick and mortar stores. The local Co-op always has seed to find as do the box stores (they have already begun putting out seeds for spring. You had better hurry they’ll…

Along the posts of the arbor project we added a little decoration. Welcome to Japanese Maple Leaf Decor 101: How to Stain an Arbor! First we put the initial coat of stain on the 4″x4″s then placed a leaf of a Japanese maple on the still slightly damp wood. Then we removed the leaf after a second coat of stain…

OK perhaps humming isn’t the proper word…buzzing…droning…that’s more like it! The cicadas are here and in action making a cacophony of sound all around. I noticed their cast off shells hanging on the tall grass foliage in the backyard while mowing the other evening but didn’t see any actual cicadas until Thursday. My daughter and I went exploring in the…

Once you have your seedlings growing strong and you’ve properly hardened them off (more on that next week) it is time to plant your seedlings in the garden.  But where should you plant them?  It may seem like a given that you’ll just go out and stick them in a hole and watch them grow, but it’s not always that…

About 6 weeks ago I was out limbing up a couple Yoshino cherry trees (Prunus x yedoensis) . I couldn’t let the clippings just go to waste so I thought I would try my hand at rooting a Yoshino cherry from the greenwood cuttings. Previously I’ve only managed to root one Yoshino Cherry from a hardwood cutting and it didn’t…

A little more guessing fun on this first day of winter! Do you know this evergreen tree with the black berries? I’ll give you a hint – I’ve written about it before! No links – that would be too easy! No rhymes either – that would be too cheesy! Oops… Yesterday’s post “What Seeds are We?” were the  seeds of the…

Each month on the last Wednesday Gail at Clay and Limestone hosts Wildflower Wednesday where bloggers can display and share their wildflower photos.  Here’s a little bit of the wildness that is my garden! Is there a wildflower more associated with fall than goldenrod? Scarlet sage (Salvia coccinea) is a self sowing annual here in my garden. Its beautiful scarlet…

Who would have thought? A daffodil (Narcissus) blooming in mid-February! The little sprouts are coming up all over but this one and a couple others like it have decided they like the weather. It could be that they are in a slightly warmer micro-climate near concrete but mostly it’s because of the extremely unseasonably warm weather we’ve been enjoying. It’s…