NEWS, GARDEN MUSINGS & ECO-FRIENDLY GARDENING TIPS
Plant a Menagerie for Kids
Plant a Menagerie for Kids If we want to share our love of gardening with the kids in our lives, we need to give them something fun to remember. Tickle their fancy with plants named [...]
Jazz Up Your Gardens With Contrasting Textures and Colored Foliage
If you can’t please yourself in your own garden, where can you? Why put up with plants that just sit there without speaking to each other - or to you? If a home landscape conveys all the charm and originality of a heavily mulched McDonald’s parking lot (minus cigarette butts), it’s time to fill in with more plants, more color and more contrast to make it more personal and exciting.
Planting Memories, Sharing Plants
My gardens are alive with memories of plants and people. When grandpa’s peonies bloom every June, deep-in-my-bones recollections come bubbling up. Even as a toddler, I was irresistibly drawn to the gigantic compost pile inside a crumbling old stone foundation behind his barn. Lusciously fragrant, audaciously magenta peonies bloomed beside the steaming, teeming life-filled mound.Maybe that’s where I caught the gardening bug so early on.
Provide Safe Nesting Materials for Birds
Providing nesting material helps birds save energy otherwise expended looking for it, but what materials? Birds will construct nests with whatever they find. When filling nesting balls or leaving nesting material outdoors, make sure it's non-toxic, untreated materials that don’t absorb moisture, degrade or entangle baby birds ...
May Blooms for Bees
Because we have diverse bee species (long-tongue and short-tongue bees, big ones and small ones, specialists and generalists) with different needs and life cycles, we need diverse kinds of plants - with different sizes, shapes, bloom times, scents, markings, reproductive structures. Read about what's blooming in May and special plants for specialist bees...
I Surrender – To the Wisdom of Plants
As a young gardener getting a whole lot of hands-on experience wrestling out rocks, poison ivy, invasive shrubs and vines, I began doubting the wisdom of traditional garden books - especially regarding double-digging. I could see that plants grew over, around and between rocks in natural areas. Why not find a better way to prepare beds on my rocky mountainside, quit pulling out stones and put plants in the right niches?
