Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Helen at Toronto Gardens is treating us with a blast from last year’s fall foliage past. The palette of colors along the hillside is nothing short of stunning. The pictures are taken from Leaside bridge and offer a nearly bird’s eye view of the leaf landscape. Hopefully the leaves will be on the trees when Helen gets back home so…

Updated on 11/23/2024 Fall is that time of year when gardeners begin the process of cleaning up the garden but also is the time when we begin to think of next year and saving seeds. One of the my favorite plants is echinacea and I like to save the seed from it to grow and expand gardens. Saving seeds of…

It’s amazing how much is growing right now. I feel like all of a sudden everything has emerged in one moment of synchronicity. From the trees and shrubs to the perennials – something is happening everywhere I look. It’s exciting, yet exasperating as there just isn’t enough time to get everything done or talk about a fraction of everything happening…

As part of Gardening Gone Wild’s Front Garden Workshop I’ll show you the tulips that are in our front sidewalk garden bed, which is a work in progress. There are only two kinds of tulips in the front garden, a purple one called ‘Negrita’ and a mixed purple and white one called ‘Shirley’. The tulips are blooming in a small…

Here are two more great fall color posts for the Garden Blogger fall Color Project. These two posts come to us from the mid-west specifically Chicago, Illinois and Iowa.Mr. McGregor’s Daughter in Chicago, Illinois is observing some really fantastic fall color. The red oaks are competing with the maples for an extraordinary autumn show. Usually the maples win hands down…

Over at Clay and Limestone Gail celebrates the diversity of native plants with Wildflower Wednesday so I thought I would join in this week to share a few of the native plants I’ve run across over the past week.  Let’s start with a shrub!  This is what I believe to be a gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa).  It has white clusters…

By far my most favorite shrub is the viburnum. I’m working on collecting as many as I can, either through propagation or buying them, to fill in areas around our gardens. If you don’t have a viburnum in your garden you really should plant at least one or two. Some are fragrant, some are evergreen, and they are great for…

Since today is St. Patrick’s Day and tradition dictates that we do all things green and as Irish as possible here are a few things green from my garden! We have green in the vegetable garden in the form of sugar snap peas, spinach, and lettuce! Other things haven’t come up yet for a visit like the asparagus (which I…

Guess what?  June is here, we’re even a week into it, and I still haven’t gotten my vegetable garden completely ready!  It’s frustrating to say the least.  I’ve been so busy making plants for other people, selling at a local farmer’s market, and recovering from a nasty family sinus virus that I just haven’t been able to get out there…

Jump on over to Our Little Acre to see the fall colors! Not my acre, Kylee’s! She has viburnums, a gingko, sumacs, and many other plants that are showing some great fall foliage. The bald cypress and the beautyberry are two that I will have to add to our garden! Don’t forget to journey up to Kalamazoo, Michigan and the…

OK so you’ve gotten your big seed order in the mail, now what?  What do you use to actually start the seeds in?  What kind of pots?  What kind of soil?  After deciding what seeds to order you need to know what medium to plant your future garden in.  There are a lot of variables out there to choose from,…

It’s January but if you are like me you’ve been rapidly perusing the seed catalogs about as fast as they come in looking for new and exciting plants for this year. It seems that each day a new plant catalog comes in the mail and I see all kinds of plants that I’d love to have in my garden, but…

The other day I just happened to have some extra stone that I had bought a few weeks ago on a large palette with some miscellaneous landscaping supplies. I thought that a dry creek bed might look better than the cheap looking plastic tube that was attached to the end of the downspout so I started putting one together using…

Spring time is such an exciting time for gardeners. The weather is better, the garden is growing again, and it’s time to add more plants to the garden! Thanks to Monrovia plants I splurged on plants for my garden the other day! Which one’s did I add? Heucheras and heucherellas! Before I tell you more you might be wondering, what…

I don’t think it would be false to say that Japanese maples are one of the most popular plants in the landscape today. With all the interesting leaf shapes and colors it’s easy to see why people like them. I consider myself a fan of Japanese maples and have two young trees in our gardens (one near the side garden…

When you plant a tree there are many things to consider about its location. The amount of sun it needs, the soil qualities and the size of the plant are some things that need to be considered. When you think about the size of the plant you need to think in three dimensions: the height of the tree, the diameter…

A couple months ago we finally found and purchased land to build a new home and (of course) new gardens. No matter what property you have there will always be imperfections that need to be addressed in some way. One of the biggest problems with our property is the driveway. It’s a LONG driveway that is approximately 1000′ before you…

My daughter and I went out to play today in the 70+ degree temperatures. Our goal was to take advantage of the last gasp of warm weather before old man winter came for his annual visit. Almost immediately my daughter darted to the sandbox. We removed the covers from the sandbox to reveal an assortment of toys half buried in…