Gardenig in state North Carolina. Tips & Guides

Ten species of hemlock tree exist worldwide, with four of those species native to North America (NA). The eastern United States is home to two of the native NA species, Canadian or eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) and Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana).

After 17 long years, billions of cicadas are ready to emerge from the ground, and we’re going to hear about it! Cicadas are harmless insects with big, bulging eyes and see-through wings held like a roof over their large bodies. Some cicadas appear every year, some every few years, and some, like the “Brood X” cicadas, are about to emerge throughout the mid-Atlantic, appear periodically every 17 years.

Homeowners have had to combat root-knot nematodes for as long as home vegetable gardens have existed. Nematodes are microscopic worms in the soil in high numbers that can cause damage to susceptible plants. Traditionally, the vegetables most affected were beans, watermelons, cucumbers, and especially three grower favorites: tomatoes, sweetpotatoes, and okra. Although there are many types of nematodes in the soil, root-knot nematodes are some of the most common and cause the large galls or knots you see on the roots of susceptible plants

***North Carolina State University is doing research about eastern carpenter bee management on private property. You can help by providing feedback in their survey, which should take just 10 to 15 minutes to complete. This information will help them develop improved management options for the future. To participate in the survey, see Carpenter Bee Survey.

The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) (SLF) is the latest non-native species to take hold in the U.S. This planthopper is large (about a half-inch long) and originally from several countries in the Far East. It was first found in Pennsylvania in 2014, and active infestations are now established in Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and as of just last week, North Carolina. SLF has not been detected in South Carolina, but it is an insect for which we need to be on the lookout.

While many think of vegetables when using the word garden, the basic definition of a garden, as a plot of soil in which plants are grown, is widely inclusive. Gardeners are passionate about native plants, fruits & vegetables, turfgrasses, roses, houseplants, container plants, mosses, and other plants, too numerous to list.

Ferns have been on the planet for more than 300 million years—about twice as long as flowering plants—and in recent years breeders with sophisticated eyes have introduced extra-showy varieties for our gardens.No wonder there is a focus on ferns, since they are naturally deer-resistant, mostly adapted to shady gardens, and hey, you don’t need to deadhead them since they’re not flowering plants. You can’t attribute any of those qualities to, say, a daylily.On my radio show and podcast, Tony treated me to a 101 on ferns and how to use them in the garden (that’s a tiny section of the 28-acre private nonprofit Juniper

Martagon lilies (Lilium martagon), also referred to as Turk’s cap lilies, have been in cultivation since 1596, and hail originally from Eurasia (meaning in this case Portugal to Siberia, with lots of color and height variations along the route). The individual blooms aren’t gigantic like modern hybrids, but there are many of them on a stem: like 12 or 15 by my count today. Stems can rise up to head-height, though many varieties are just 4 or so feet high.The best thing about martagons is their adaptability: They are as good, both aesthetically and culturally, in a quite-sunny flower bed as in a woodsy-looking shade garden (not too dark, now; at least give them good filtered light so they bloom well). The worst thing is how hard it is to get your hands on some. Martagons aren’t fast to multiply, so bulb vendors can co

Peter is one of the world’s master bread-makers, and the author of six books on bread baking, including multiple James Beard Award winners such as “Whole Grain Breads,” “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice,” and “Crust and Crumb.” He is a baking instructor on the faculty of Johnson and Wales University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has even delivered a popular TED talk on the subject.So when was the last time you baked bread—which to my taste competes with homemade soup as the ultimate comfort this time of year, when we gardeners head mostly indoors for the long wait? I interviewed Peter Reinhart on my public-radio show for inspiration on the best-tasting, healthiest ingredients—including some that are gluten free. The transcript of our chat follows:‘bread

I don’t know why I waited so long to add Clematis ‘Roguchi’ to my garden, but I finally did so a couple of years ago, and then bought another plant this spring. (It’s also found as ‘Rooguchi’ in various catalogs, and don’t ask me which is correct. What everyone agrees upon: it’s one of the best small-flowered clematis there is.)  I quickly learned that it is long-blooming—in North Carolina, Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery says May through September; for me, it starts a little later but goes all summer long, and into fall. To the delight of me and the bees, who love to crawl inside its spectacular 2-inch purple bells, it just keeps on producing.Clematis ‘Roguchi’ performs like a herbaceous perennial—it’s more of a scamperer than a climber, and it doesn’t become some crushing woody vine. Because of that neighborly demeanor, it’s beautiful w

Ever wonder, for instance, why some blue hostas turn dull by high summer, or certain yellow and variegated varieties fade worse than others? Or did you know that ‘Halcyon’ (a blue hosta) has produced all the “sports” or mutations above, and more? In a story and a podcast, get to know our most beloved shade-garden standby more intimately than ever before.I suppose I already knew that there are more than 6,000 named hosta varieties, though perhaps merely 500 are truly garden-worthy, says Tony, whose standard is what he calls “The 10-Foot Test.” Meaning:“If you can’t tell it from 10 feet away witho

THE BANG-BANG SOUND FROM THE WOODS this time of year—it’s hunting season!—always reminds me of who isn’t welcome in my garden, thanks to a tall fence.  Keeping deer out, or choosing plants that are somewhat less palatable for the areas where you cannot bar them, was the topic of this week’s podcast.

On my public-radio show, Arboretum director Mark Weathington took me through the years-long process of “discovering” new plants. Plus, Mark highlighted some Arboretum specialties that may belong in your garden, including standout redbuds and mahonias, and the lesser-known evergreen shrub Illicium, and even showy native dogwoods selected to withstand increasingly saline soils in tricky coastal areas.What’s now called the J.C. Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University is where I met my first Cephalotaxus–a near-lookalike to our common evergreen yews but excitingly deer-resistant. And then a moment later I met another one–this time a columnar form–an

More of a good thing, I guess you could say, and also deer-resistant.The Japanese plum yew has linear, dark green flat needles that resemble its namesake’s: the yew, or Taxus. Those are its needles and also its male reproductive structures, below; ‘Prostrata’ is all-male, and therefore makes no female seed-producing structures.While Taxus is deer candy, though, Cephalotaxus is rated as not to their liking by experts from geographic areas as diver

Gardeners in some areas of Texas where the species is endemic are smiling right now. “I’ve got them all over my backyard,” they are perhaps saying, because the species can be found growing as a self-sowing annual in parts of Florida and North Carolina and Texas, says the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.The H. argophyllus selection I grew in 2012 was a refinement of the straight species called ‘Japanese Silver-Leaf’ (which I expect was so named after being bred in that country, as numerous fine sunflower varieties have been—crossing the genetics of our various U.S. natives). My plants grew from about 5 feet to 7 feet.Various sources say one should hide its awkward-looking “legs” with some other mid

Not long ago, we swapped  pet peeves (like made-up plant names applied by marketers in the guise of trademarks) and also plants we’re crazy about—including overlooked ones, ones Tony calls “plants that need a good p.r. person.” He’d certainly be the publicist I’d hire if I were a shrinking violet with chlorophyll in my veins. Meet some of these overlooked creatures.Yes, Tony Avent allows the occasional common name—provided it’s a valid one, like catmint for Nepeta, for example, or elephant ear for Colocasia. But under the headline Peltoboykinia watanabei in his latest catalog, above the description including the Tony-isms “tall, bold and bodacious,” and a “fabulous member o

Dr. Tripp, the voice of Robin Hood Radio’s newest program, “Your Health,” received her D.O. from the University of New England. In previous incarnations she has her BS and MS from Cornell; her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, where she also served as Curator of Conifers for the famed J.C. Raulston Arboretum, and did postdoctoral work at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. She knows from trees and shrubs—and that’s what we talked about:q&a: great trees for gardens, with kim trippQ.What woody plants always got your recommendation—what did you try to encourage clients to plant when you were making gardens for people, while supporting yourself through medical school? A. The first thing I always did, especially with a new client, was to walk around with them and say, “Let’s just see what’s growing here now–what’s out there and doing well,” and have a look at it and see if we like it or don’t. And we’d go from there.I found a few plants in our region that no matter what the conditions, were always doing well—even with deer browse.They were thi

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center says Mertensia is native from southern Ontario to eastern Minnesota, down to North Carolina, Arkansas and eastern Kansas, and “naturalized northeastward.” I have never seen it in the wild, but even a grouping of five or so plants can be dramatic in the early spring home garden.Virginia bluebells (Zones 4-7, maybe warmer) is summer-dormant, but before its long late-June-to-April nap, it shows off bigtime. A beautiful clump of foliage comes first—tender looking, with a blue-green cast. Then come the flower stems (temporarily making the plant not just a foot tall but almost tw

Q. Since all gardening starts with the soil, Ira, one that really caught my eye was the DIY soil test with dishwashing powder and water in the glass jar. A. I first came across the test back in the 70s, when I was a 4-H and Girl Scout leader. The area in North Carolina where I was living at the time had red clay (just like we do here in Virginia).You can sort of tell what kind of soil you have by making a ball of it in your hand, but to be more clear about your soil texture—so you can have a better idea of moisture-holding capacity and how much organic material in the form of compost you need—this test is great.You take a quart Mason jar, fill it one-third to half full with soil. Make sure you’re just getting soil, and not big clumps of grass; go below that, to sample the first 6 inches.A trowel you use for planting bulbs is great for getting a soil profile.Then add water until the jar is about t

A candid head’s up: Like Jeff, I am less-than-enthusiastic about the seemingly widespread desire among gardeners to shop their way out of issues with pests, disease, or soil imbalances. I buy a lot of seeds and bulbs and plants–but not a lot of “stuff.”Jeff and I had a funny email exchange, when I invited him to join me on the radio show and podcast, and asked about what topics he’d most like to cover together.“The topics that I speak on most frequently are garden remedies and thoughtful organic gardening,” Jeff replied. When I read that, my slightly dark humor zoomed in on the phrase “thoughtful organic gardening.”Except I thought he said, “thoughtless organic gardening.” I g

The backstory: When I heard the title of a lecture being given nearby by a visiting North Carolina State University zoologist, I had to know more. The talk wasn’t titled “Woodchuck-Proof Your Backyard,” or “Rabbits Be Gone,” which would have attracted me, too, but for more obvious reasons. It sounded far more dramatic:“The Return of Predators to Urban America.”The speaker was Kays, a North Carolina State University zoologist and expert in using new technologies to study free-ranging animals, including the ones that may very well live in your neighborhood and garden. He leads the project called eMammal—a citizen-science animal-counting collaboration with the Smithsonian—and directs the Biodiversity Lab in the Nature Research Center of North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. I invited him to my public-radio pro

Matching the specific variety of edible to its intended use just makes sense, especially if putting up some of the harvest is in your plans. It has always been in Carol’s.“I was born into a family that grew its own food,” says Carol. “My Swedish grandmother planted a garden every summer that was counted on to feed the whole family–my grandparents, their five children, spouses, and grandchildren.”And that meant food year-round, much of it canned over a woodstove in a New Hampshire house that had no running water or electricity. From a young age, she helped carry water from the well 200 yards uphill in a pair of buckets on a wooden yoke over her shoulders at food-preserving time, to get the water baths going.A “rock-reinforced hole in the ground” was their root cellar

The “black” tomatoes (more brownish-purple than anything near black) often have a flavor that’s described as smoky, or earthy. You may have grown ‘Black Krim’ and ‘Cherokee Purple’—two very good ones—and now I’m eyeing ‘Carbon,’ which people are talking about. Same with ‘Paul Robeson,’ a tomato with a great taste (and a great story).Want a black cherry tomato to mix things up in the salad bowl (that link will take you to one, as will this one)? Thinking larger, and darker: At the extreme of dark tomato color there’s open-pollinated ‘Indigo Rose,’ an Oregon State University development (photo above from High Mowing Seeds). It’s the first tom

Maybe because my name is Roach, or because I live in a very old house in a rural area into which I stuff a ridiculous number of plants each winter after summering them outdoors, bringing many other living things in along with them…for whatever reason, in January I was delighted and fascinated reading the new study. It was published by entomologists at North Carolina State University, who surveyed homes in or near Raleigh, to try to get some sense of just how diverse their indoor microbiomes might be.Wait till you hear. We are talking an average of 90-plus different arthropod types per home.The study is called, “Arthropods of the Great Indoors: Characterizing Diversity Inside Urban and Suburban Homes,” and its lead author, Dr. Matthew Bertone, took me though the insights. We talked about stink bugs and lady beetles, spiders and fruit flies—and even what in the wo

I’m a longtime organic gardener, meaning no lover of chemical “answers” to problems, but I’m also no lover of the endless and often-wacky home remedies that I read about year after year.Some home remedies do work, but some are not just ineffective, but also dangerous, sometimes as dangerous as chemicals.I was interested to read an open letter in summer 2015 to “Consumer Reports” written by Jeff, a former Associate Professor of Horticultural Science at University of Minnesota, who has a masters in entomology and PhD in horticulture, plus 20 years of practical and research experience with plants. He’s the author of “The Truth About

No problem, I said, we’ll just call Craig LeHoullier—who some of you will recognize as the author of the hit book “Epic Tomatoes” and breeder of dwarf tomatoes, in particular, whose first book was actually a little how-to guide called “Growing Vegetables in Straw Bales.”I invited him back to my public-radio show and podcast from his home and garden in North Carolina to talk about the straw bale gardening how-to’s: how to prep and care for the bales, what crops are adapted to such conditions, and more.Read along as you listen to the February

I have known some extreme plant geeks in my time–people whose combined lust and knowledge set them on a course, sometimes to very out-of-the-way places around the world, to find, collect, and eventually disseminate stuff that wasn’t your average red geranium or generic hosta.  One of those longtime he’s-gotta-have-it botanical OCD types, Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery in North Carolina, introduced me to the Nichols brothers. What started as the quest to meet and acquire every possible var

Though we’ve never met, apparently the sender of the note,Nancy Duffy, a North Carolina-based garden designer with an extensive home garden of her own, has either been spying on me remotely, or can read minds—or so it seems based on this paragraph in the message (echoed on her website):“Bags of saved tags. Scattered notes in journals. Streams of photos on the phone and computer. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all of your plant records in one place?”Both in her clients’ gardens and her own, Nancy says, she’d watched this frustrating scene play out too many times:“Someone asks th

Before I called Craig, I had searched in the Seed Savers Exchange database for tomato, and found more than 12,000 listings, not including the tiniest currant types or the many hybrids that Seed Savers doesn’t even focus on. How to choose–and how to make room for all the tomatoes we simply cannot resist?Craig is also cofounder of the Dwarf Tomato Project (those are some dwarf types sliced open up top), which gets back to the issue of how many tomatoes can be squeezed in,

When I got my little Victorian-era house 30ish years ago, it was in disrepair, including a sagging front porch. If the porch hadn’t been a wreck, I might never have been crawling around its perimeter that first spring to assess the situation, and wouldn’t have seen three little reddish flowers poking their faces out from just beneath it–native Trillium erectum or wakerobins that I rescued and transplanted, plants that have multiplied since.Tony and I talked about the showy-leaved Southeastern species he particularly loves (many are hardy up North, too); about how they multiply (and which ones are inclined to do so faster); about what Trillium combine well with in the garden, and why we should look for “nursery-propagated” and not “nur

In his compelling, unexpected new book, “Candid Creatures: How Camera Traps Reveal the Mysteries of Nature,” we get to see the hidden world that scientists have discovered using what are maybe more commonly known to some of us as trail cameras. We learn about the populations and behaviors of critically endangered species worldwide—and also about others you’ve seen in your own backyard.Yes, there are both chimpanzee (above) and raccoon selfies in “Candid Creatures”—illustrated with more than 600 photos that Kays has curated from the work of noted research colleagues around the globe. Kays, a co-author of the field guide “Mammals of North Ame

This summer, 175ish of those pots and grow bags in Craig’s North Carolina driveway laboratory are tomatoes, and that’s what he talked to me about on my public-radio show and podcast.Craig is the tomato adviser to Seed Savers Exchange, and author of the bestselling book “Epic Tomatoes,” so whether you’re growing your own or trying to decide among the many distinctive beauties at the local farmers’ market: Craig LeHoullier has the insider info.Read along as you listen to the July 11, 2016 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to

Brie Arthur, a Michigan native who studied horticulture and landscape design at Purdue, is now based in North Carolina, where she has worked as a plant propagator and grower at top nurseries like Plant Delights and Camellia Forest.In recent years Brie has transitioned to a garden-communicator role–writing, lecturing and also working as a correspondent for the popular public television program “Growing a Greener World.” Oh, and lest I forget: She is totally mad about tomatoes, growing 100-plus varieties a season…and besides a 101 in foodscaping, I got some tomato recommendations from Brie, too.Read along as you listen to the May 29, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future edi

And last week I wrote a tomato growing story as part of a garden series I’ve been doing in “The New York Times,” and this week I wanted to continue that tomato theme and talk about them with Mr. Tomato himself, Craig LeHoullier, a.k.a. NC Tomato Man and author of the classic book, “Epic Tomatoes (affiliate link). Comment in the box at the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy.Craig has gardened and grown tomatoes in areas of the U.S. as different as New England and Seattle, Pennsylvania and Raleigh, North Carolina, and lately in the mountains of Western North Carolina, too. He’s one of the founders of the Dwarf Tomato Project that we’ve talked about on the show before, and generally just an all tomato all the time

British-born Chris’s day job is as communications manager for Sow True Seed in Asheville, North Carolina. Before and after hours, you’ll often find him growing, or maybe cooking and certainly eating okra, lots and lots of okra—or directing The Utopian Seed Project and serving on boards of other non-profits focused on seed and food security and sustainability.Learn the history of okra, the surprising cousins in the Mallow family it’s related to, and why it’s worth a look for its beauty, productivity, and the range of culinary uses it offers (and why its slimy reputation is just a bad rap). Plus: Enter to win the book in the comments box at the very bottom of the page.Read along as you listen to the July 1, 2019 edition of my public-

Craig, who gardens in North Carolina, is a retired chemist with a longtime passion for tomatoes. He’s the co-founder of the Dwarf Tomato Project, an advisor on tomatoes to Seed Savers Exchange, and the person who in 1990 named the popular heirloom ‘Cherokee Purple’ from seed that had been passed down and eventually made its way to him.Craig and Joe Lamp’l, the longtime public-television host of “Growing A Greener World,” are also  partnering on the upcoming Growing Epic Tomatoes virtual course, which is open for registration now. Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of “Epic Tomatoes” (af