Gardenig in Georgia. Tips & Guides

If you spend a lot of time out in the garden it's smart to have the skills to identify the different types of bees—plus wasps and other insects that mimic bees—that you're most likely to encounter.

“Connecting with nature.” “Trying something different.” “An appreciation of history.” Ask a new generation of gardeners just why they want to embark on a course in horticulture at a country house estate and those are the kinds of answers they will give you.

Today’s photos are from Connie Raines in Georgia.

Georgia has many different red mushrooms, growing on the ground or trees and having all kinds of shapes and sizes. We’ll help you distinguish these properly.

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Due to their size and expense, gardeners tend to put a lot more thought into the trees they ultimately buy for their landscape. While a perennial might only live for 6 or 7 years, a tree might grace your garden for 50 years or more—outliving the person who so carefully selected it, in fact. Here at Fine Gardening, we feel strongly that trees should look good in more than one season (for all of the reasons above AND because they take up a lot of real estate). Therefore, on today’s episode, we may be highlighting our favorite flowering trees for every season, but these choices have more going for them than just some fleeting blooms. Listen to hear about which trees we’re willing to sacrifice a chunk of our paycheck on and why.    

As summer approaches and we’re faced with another season of determining what's for dinner, we're sharing a glimpse at how BHG readers gather for a meal. Welcome to our new series, Dinner Diaries, where we're asking readers to anonymously share how they get dinner on the table including grocery shopping, budgeting, cooking, and their favorite family recipes. Here, a family of three in Georgia works together to get dinner on the table. Read on to see how they shop, prep, and cook to get dinner, and weekend breakfasts, on the table.

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Knowing when to plant collard greens is key to their success. They can be grown directly from seeds or the seedlings transplanted into garden beds or containers to get a head start on the harvest. When deciding how and when to plant collard greens, your local climate and the length of your growing season are some of the most important factors to consider. In this article you’ll learn about the importance of timing, when to start collard green seeds indoors, when to direct sow outdoors, when to transplant seedlings, and get tips for growing healthy plants.

Anyone who knew Angela Jupe, the late landscape architect and garden maker, will remember her particular love of snowdrops, or Galanthus, as this genus of dainty bulbous perennials is properly known.

A small vegetable garden sits in front of the guest house at this elegant Georgian home in Oxfordshire

We’re visiting with Bonnie Plikaytis in north Georgia today.

Perhaps the most popular native shrub in the whole encyclopedia is Mountain Laurel. The eastern mountains from New England to Georgia are full of it, but nobody finds it tiresome. Its evergreen foliage is an asset, but what sweeps the public off their feet is the brilliant show of bloom in June. It is altogether irresistible.

Nature reflects the color of the spirit. Beauty is not confined to a season nor to region. The gardens of Georgia or Florida are perpetually in bloom, but are they more beautiful than northern gardens in winter, where imagination sorts the beautiful tracery of tree branches into designs that few artists have approached in their delineation of nature? Are the Alps grander than the Rockies? Who can judge?

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Worcestershire provides some of the country’s loveliest scenery. With the Cotswolds to the south-east, the Malverns and the Shropshire Hills to the west and several notable rivers, including the Avon, the Severn and Teme running through it, this is a fertile, bucolic landscape that’s perfect for exploration and very conducive to agriculture. 

Skunks are easy to identify from appearance—and smell! But these handsome mammals typically mind their own business and are more interested in excavating their dinner than in what you’re doing. “They’re primarily insectivores so they provide a useful ecological service, digging up insects in the soil,” says Sheldon Owen, PhD, wildlife extension specialist atWest Virginia University. “The issue is if they decide to den under your porch or crawlspace.”

Creating a garden is, initially, an introverted process. It takes a while to imagine a garden and to develop it into its final form. For much of that period your thoughts are just part of an evolving dream of a future reality. It takes longer to build a garden and a whole lifetime, or more, for that garden to mature. To embark on making a garden is an act of faith. The creative journey is made unique by the relationships we have with those we enlist to help us. Without other people there would be no garden. Together, we generate a great alchemical soup of ideas, we consider constraints and we discuss details that ultimately coalesce into the new garden. Landscape gardens can express themselves in myriad ways. I have always enjoyed the freedom landscaping offers to explore what the land, the people and the circumstances ultimately reveal.

Celebrate the season with these festive 2-for-1 Garden events. Use your2-for-1 Gardens entry card this December to discover some of the most exciting winter events taking place, be transported to Narnia at Leeds Castle or marvel at the 18m dried flower garland at Cotehele.

It appears that wallpaper will spend some time in the limelight this coming year, according to the pros.

This is Julie Prince (Julie’s Georgia Garden), with a few pictures from the late summer and fall garden. The pool garden was started in the summer of 2020. The front-drive garden was started in 2021. Both are still “works in progress”! Things are changing constantly as I try to give the garden more height and winter interest.

Last week, I found this pineapple guava fruit growing on a bush in Charleston. Pineapple guava is an incredibly tasty fruit from an evergreen shrub native to South America.

How to Grow and Care for Red Oak Trees Quercus rubra

I love this time of year when the roadsides and gardens become full of gold. Goldenrod is everywhere! It brightens the landscape and lifts my mood. Goldenrod comes in all different shapes, sizes, and even colors (Solidago ptarmicoides, for example, has white, daisy-like flowers). A search for goldenrod on the extremely useful and informative website Namethatplant.net returned 61 tax in the Carolinas and Georgia, a solidago for almost every garden situation. Zigzag goldenrod (Solidago flexicaulis) is an easy-care woodland goldenrod. Unsurprisingly, southern bog goldenrod (Solidago austrina) thrives in sunny, boggy areas. As its scientific name indicates, Solidago odora has fragrant, anise-scented leaves when crushed. Finally, South Carolina’s state wildflower, Solidago altissima (tall goldenrod), is a plant of drier, disturbed soil.

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In 2017 Bailey Nurseries sent me four ‘Spring Lace’ viburnums to trial. When in flower in spring, they have become one of my most asked-about plants. An interspecific cross developed at the University of Georgia by Michael Dirr, this lovely rounded selection is a relatively compact plant in the viburnum world, reaching its mature size in about 8 to 10 years. ‘Spring Lace’ thrives in average conditions and is relatively drought tolerant once established. It doesn’t skip a beat in the heat and humidity of the South and has been such an outstanding performer that we now grow it for our plant sales.

There are many foods and ingredients that illicit strong opinions among eaters, often based on one unpleasant sensory experience due to poor preparation and not the food itself. Okra, a mucilaginous member of the Mallow family, is no stranger.

When Neil Patterson Jr. was about 7 or 8 years old, he saw a painting called “Gathering Chestnuts,” by Tonawanda Seneca artist Ernest Smith. Patterson didn’t realize that the painting showed a grove of American chestnuts, a tree that had been all but extinct since his great-grandparents’ time. Instead, what struck Patterson was the family in the foreground: As a man throws a wooden club to knock chestnuts from the branches above, a child shells the nuts and a woman gathers them in a basket. Even the dog seems engrossed in the process, watching with head cocked as the club sails through the air.

John Pyle | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

Today’s photos are from Connie Raines.

Ever wondered about the tiny, vibrant visitors that flit through Georgia’s gardens and woodlands? Look no further – explore with us the captivating world of Hummingbirds In Georgia!

What has changed in the garden since last week? Well, on Wednesday I got tired of waiting (for cold, windy days and then scorching hot days to pass) and planted out 3 of my squash plants. One Georgia Candy Rooster went out into the ‘allotment’ in the Sunset Strip, and two Rugosa fruilana courgettes went into a raised bed in the main garden. Each one was planted out into a mound of fresh compost, and protected with a plastic cloche and eco-friendly slug pellets. I replaced the black plastic mulch on the beds to give them extra warm and moist soil.

Header image: Brooke Lark/Unsplash

Ever since we started building this new garden, I have been pondering what I would grow in 2016 – it’s first season as a complete (I hope!) garden. It has been hard to decide. During my garden-free years I built up a long list of things I really wanted to grow, but couldn’t. I can’t grow them all at the same time, so which ones to choose? And, to be honest, my gardening mojo has yet to fully return. I’m not feeling the same pre-season excitement as I used to. So whilst I have had some ideas about what I might grow this year, I’d been avoiding putting them down on paper and finalising a garden plan.

Space research can take you to some odd places. Siberia isn’t known for being a hospitable environment, and cosmonauts used to go into space with a gun in case something went wrong with their re-entry and they wound up having to defence themselves from bears in a Siberian forest. Even so, Russia has built a new spaceport there (Vostochny Cosmodrome), to reduce dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan.