September is often touted as the month when you can plant hardy perennials, shrubs and trees, giving their root systems a good start while the soil is warm. Even if you’re already thinking about restocking the greenhouse, you can still prepare your outdoor garden by adding amendments, and loosening the ground to get a jump-start […]
Summer’s horticultural bounty makes it easy to decorate your home with the contents of your garden and greenhouse. But annual and perennial flowers are not the only candidates for the best displays. Alongside your favorite black-eyed Susans, lilies, and bunches of sweetly scented roses, consider adding colorful foliage, boughs and berries from shrubs and grasses […]
Each year a moment arrives when your garden calls out to be photographed. Suddenly those cascading branches of ‘Snowmound’ spirea create a colorful explosion next to vivid yellow daylilies and bright purple sparks of chive blossoms. Get out the camera! But how can you create a shot that rivals those fabulous magazine photos? Over the […]
Grafted what? OK, as home gardeners, most of us are familiar with grafting apples, roses or grapes for disease resistance and vigor. But right now, around the world—from Japan to India, Israel to Greece and New Zealand—commercial growers are grafting hybrid rootstocks (bottoms) to single-season scions (tops) like watermelons, eggplants or tomatoes. Within a few […]
Just imagine, box loads of free plants from major growers arriving on your doorstep each spring. Oh boy. That’s my favorite garden writer’s perk—the chance to trial new plants a year or two before they hit the market. However, when I first started writing about gardens, I was uncomfortable receiving what some term “swag” from […]
Think of the delight of stepping into a greenhouse, surrounded by the sights and scents of flowering plants. Now, I invite you to expand that greenhouse experience into a field walk, moving through acres of flowers that spread to the horizon like a colorful sea. It’s a gardening joy like no other. But growers rarely […]
I’ve never met an indoor garden show I didn’t like. From Philadelphia to San Francisco, Boise to Atlanta—each show floor is like a huge greenhouse, creating garden magic in the middle of winter. I love the smell of bark mulch in the morning, the scents of early-blooming shrubs, the color and drama, both in the […]
In wintertime, the greenhouse is in its glory with colorful and glowing plants. It takes good care—water, heat and light—for these greenhouse beauties to survive. But just beyond the glass, the landscape stretches in patterns of gray and brown, every branch and drooping evergreen leaf outlined in a thin casing of ice. What mechanisms make […]
The hunt is on for the rare and unusual It’s the darkest time of the year, when your outdoor garden makes few demands—although you may be enjoying the plants in your greenhouse—so now is the perfect time to curl up and read catalogs. Start your armchair hunt for the next fabulous wow-factor plant to give […]
Ferns are the duct tape of garden design—they visually connect all other disparate plants. That’s why floral designers feature ferns in bouquets. And they perform the same function when you’re staging plants this winter in your greenhouse. To find out which ferns thrive best under glass I called on my friend Judith Jones, the owner […]
The decisions about which new plants will appear at a nursery near you next spring are happening right now. Here’s a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes process so you can jumpstart your own plant wish list. I was recently one of three judges for the 2009 New Varieties Showcase at the Farwest trade show in Portland, […]
Unusual fruiting shrubs and trees – where have you been all my gardening life? That was the question I asked myself while standing at One Green World’s tasting table in Molalla, Oregon. The nursery specializes in unique fruits from around the world. Affable owner, Jim Gilbert, presided over an enticing array of mouth-watering offerings. Landscaping […]
