Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

I’m a big fan of foliage! There is no better time of the year than autumn for those who love foliage, and naturally fall is one of my favorite times of the year. I thought I would share with you some photos I have taken over the last month of the foliage from my garden. Tennessee often has amazing fall…

Daylilies are one of the easiest plants to learn how to hybridize. The large flowers with easy to get to pollen make it a simple matter to transfer pollen from one flower to another.  There are a couple simple things you need to know before you start hybridizing daylilies. The first is where the pollen is and the second is…

The summer heat is coming and with the heat comes a whole new set of rules for gardening. The warm season vegetables grow great while the cool season plants bolt quickly. What if you want to keep your cool season plantings growing longer into the summer? Is there a way to do that? The answer is yes there is, move…

Mid July finds my garden a little bit rough around the edges. The need for more garden time is always present with gardens needing weeded, the lawn needing mowed and cleaned up, tomatoes that need re-staked, and many other garden chores. It’s not just the lack of garden time though, the weather has played a significant role. No rain for…

Recently the folks at Lowe’s Creative Ideas asked me if I could put together a once a month project using products I found at Lowe’s that fit a specific theme.  Of course since I enjoy doing these types of projects around the garden I jumped at the chance!  This month they wanted a project centered around the theme:”Pots and Plants”. …

The rainy weather and “normal” temperatures seem to be headed back our way, so why not take a look back at some sunny blooms from summer’s past? These flowers all came from the July of 2009 version of my garden, some are annuals and others are perennials and some are somewhere in between!  The in between flowers are generally perennials…

I find Garden Tours fun to put together. It’s an opportunity incessantly talk about plants, plans, and ideas and that is one of my favorite things to do! I put together a garden tour of our current garden on YouTube which you can watch down below. To summarize the year so far we moved in November of 2023 to our…

What is a garden without the trees?  Bare and boring!  Without a good tree you lose the shade they provide, the elegant grace that trees offer as a focal point, the fruit the tree may bear, the benefit to the wildlife around us – I think you agree, you just have to have a tree!  But what trees would you…

Yesterday in a walk around the yard we discovered some signs of the spring to come. Daffodils are sprouting up all over, the verbena is greening up and some sedum sprouts are peaking from their winter slumber. Maybe it’s early, but the temperatures have felt like spring. Historically our worst winter weather tends to happen in February and March but…

What do winter blooms, buds, bark and branches all have in common?  You will have to look at the end of this post to find out.  See if you can guess!The Winter BloomsThe henbit in our area is beginning to show signs of blooming.  Masses of little tiny flowers will over take yards creating a purple carpet for spring.The lone…

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…

It’s time to take a trip up to Washington and visit Tatyana.  She went on a visit to one of her favorite nurseries that has a heavy emphasis on Japanese maples!  Japanese maples can be one of the spectacular trees for fall color.  While throughout the year Japanese maple colors can range from variegated white and green to deep reds the fall…

For while I thought the deer were gone.  Then this spring we saw the telltale signs of the whitetail deer.  The hoof prints, the nibbles and the um…other signs. Then came the sightings. A single doe came strolling through the backyard taking nibbles of various plants.  Fortunately most of the plants in our garden are deer resistant so the deer…

This time of year the bones of my become very exposed. The deciduous leaves of most of my plants have fallen and blown away on the wind to reveal the stone and structures that lay underneath. It’s a good time to evaluate how the stone in the garden fits. Here is one of my dry creek beds that helps to…

THis first of the irises to bloom this year are the reblooming white irises we have in the Japanese maple garden. It’s a small garden just to one side of our patio that ,of course, has a Japanese maple! It was a gift a few years ago to me for Father’s Day. The reblooming white irises came home with me…

I went out to water plants in the garden this morning and thought it was a good time to show you how the garden was growing this morning.  So far the first week of May have been warm and sunny and the garden is responding accordingly.  Here is what you can see in our zone 6b garden this spring: Our…

The Gardening Gone Wild photo contest for February is all about Winter Light. The picture below is my entry which I took from our upstairs window out across the yard. I’m calling it Shadow Play, you can probably figure out why! The shadows of the ice covered trees are dancing across the backyard and the children’s playset creating an unusual…

In my second year with our garden I experienced the joys and wonders of living with deer. In the three and a half years since I’ve learned a lot about protecting plants from deer but I still suffer from their exploits frequently. Most notably this year the deer discovered my vegetable garden for the first time. Maybe you noticed the…