Trees Ideas, Tips & Guides

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Cherries make a wonderful tree for all sizes of garden. Many varieties are attractive trees, bearing spring blossom, colourful fruit, interesting bark and leafy foliage that turns orange, red and yellow in autumn.

The appearance of a plant gives lots of clues as to its health and well-being. Yellow leaves may be an indication of a problem and are best investigated to find out the cause, ideally at an early stage before any problem becomes too advanced. The horticultural term for yellowing leaves is chlorosis.

The All About Plants category debuted in the Great Pavilion at RHS Chelsea 2022. This year, six gardens supported by Project Giving Back and designed in collaboration with a UK charity, will be on display. A grief garden, a skate park with a focus on edible planting, and a vibrant design that champions good gut health are just a snapshot of the gardens putting plants at the forefront of the design and keeping hard landscape at a minimum.

Big Leaf Succulents are awesome for any garden, big or small. They're easy to take care of and come in cool varieties like Snake Plant, Giant Blue Echeveria, and Sunburst Aeonium. There's also Felt Bush, Whale's Tongue Agave, Madagascar Palm, Black Rose, Paddle Plant, Dinner Plate Aeonium, Tree Stonecrop, Foxtail Agave, Donkey Ears, Flapjack, and Tree Houseleek. Check them out for some leafy goodness!

If you’re thinking about getting a tattoo, cherry blossom trees can be a wonderful choice. These delicate and lovely trees are not just beautiful in nature; they can also make stunning body art.

Lately, I have noticed that the mail-order garden supply catalogs are full of Asian-themed garden accessories such as pots, traditional bamboo fences, and stone lanterns. This seems to go along with the trend toward Asian-inspired minimalism in home décor. In California and the Pacific Northwest, traditional Asian and Asian-inspired gardens have been popular for years. Can a national vogue for Chinese and Japanese gardens be far behind?

The colors chosen in the planning of a garden are very much a matter of personal taste but there are particularly pleasing combinations.

Japanese Maple seeds have a very hard outer coating as do many ornamental plants. Under natural conditions, the seeds would have to be on the ground for almost two years before they would germinate. All that happens the first winter is the moisture softens the hard outer shell, and the second winter germination begins to take place. For all of this to happen in the proper sequence so the seedlings sprout at a time of the year when freezing temperatures or hot summer sun doesn’t kill them, takes a tremendous amount of luck. You can improve the odds by controlling some of these conditions, and shorten the cycle.

TRY NATIVE SHRUBS IN YOUR LANDSCAPE

A NORWAY MAPLE whose leaves are dark, glistening crimson throughout the spring and summer is horticultural news that opens all opportunities for new landscaping effects. The form known as Schwedler maple has made an effort toward this rewarding goal, but its red changes to green with the arrival of summer. Finally, along comes the postwar variety Crimson King, which really fills the bill. As a result, it is making headlines such as no other new tree has achieved in years.

Even if you’re not a gardener, you may know the fir tree from the popular balsam firs sold as cut trees over the holidays.  This tree and other related fir trees make beautiful landscape plants, providing a habitat for birds as well.

Most shrubs are low-maintenance plants that grow well for years with little attention. However, it is important to start with species well adapted to the local climate and soils. Thousands of shrubs range from dwarfs that hug the ground to tall, tree-like specimens. Before selecting any for your garden, it pays to look around and study those thriving in established landscapes of nearby neighborhoods. Remember that mature shrubs often look very different from their young counterparts sold in pots.

ACER CAPILLIPES Young bark striated with white; young growths coral red, leaves turning crimson in autumn. A. davidii, young bark shiny green, striated with white; leaves usually turn yellow and purple in autumn. Long chains of keys striking. A. griseum, paper bark maple, the outer bark peeling in papery flakes to show the copper-colored inner bark; opening leaves bronze colored, turning red or orange in autumn. A. grosseri, A. g. hersii, young bark green or yellowish striated with white, leaves orange and crimson in autumn. A. pennsylvanicum, moosewood, young bark green striped and patterned with white, the large leaves pinkish on opening turning clear in autumn. A. rufinerve, bark green, with an elaborate pattern of greyish markings, persisting on old trunks; leaves red when young and usually crimson in autumn, when the long chains of keys are attractive.

The gardener must at times give plants protection against too intense light and against excessively high temperatures.

Columnar or Fastigiate trees

January is an interesting time to look for birds in the garden, as days are short and the availability of natural food is limited. This brings more birds into gardens, for whom a reliable source of supplementary food can be a lifeline.

This time of year, it’s easy to succumb to the winter blues—which is especially true if you live somewhere that gets dark early.

Since the introduction of fiberglass pools, tremendous interest has been shown in medium-sized garden pools.

Choosing a location is the most important initial decision in designing your garden pond. Locate the pond in an active area of your yard so that you can enjoy it throughout the year. It is important to situate the pond around your best view of your garden. For instance, if you have a deck overlooking your yard, set the pond in an area where you can see it from the deck’s best vantage point. Consider the winter months and situate the pond so that you can view it from inside the home. An attractive pond draws people to it like bees around a honey pot.

It used to be so easy in my father’s day. In mid-winter, gardeners received mail-order catalogs from many far-flung nurseries and plant purveyors. Mailboxes groaned under the weight of all the catalogs, but no one minded because there is nothing like looking at pages and pages of perfect annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees on a gray, uninspiring day at the end of January. With the holidays over and spring yet to happen, catalogs satisfied the universal hunger for color, light, and rebirth. Besides, unless there is a flu epidemic, nothing else happens between New Year’s and Valentine’s Day.

Few perennials can offer what the peony does–beautiful, prolific flowers in early summer and good foliage afterwards. Once established, peonies will flower for many years with minimum care. Moreover, they’re incredibly hardy and can easily withstand cold northern winters.

I’ve loved Wales ever since university days in Swansea, so we always try to fit in a family holiday or weekend there. This August, we hired a cottage on Anglesey for a week to take advantage of its wonderful sandy beaches, the epic landscape of nearby Snowdonia and the many wonderful historic gardens on offer. With my wife, two teenage sons and mother coming, there was something for everyone – perfect for a varied, budget-friendly, three-generation holiday (even if the car on the way up was a bit of a squeeze).

Last September my husband and I fulfilled a long-held dream of visiting Australia, when we decided to take a road trip from Brisbane to Sydney. When you look at the map, our trip marks only a tiny slice of this massive country, but we knew we wanted to take it slowly and really soak up the countryside and enjoy the places we did have time to see.

There are many different types of flowers to grow in your garden, adding interest, colour and food for wildlife. Types of flowers can range from annuals to perennials, climbers to ground cover, and spring flowers to summer flowers. Flowers also come in a variety of different shapes, sizes and colours.

Discover the funny side of gardening with plants that resemble boobs and breasts! From Breast Milk Fruit to Boob Cactus, these plants might make you giggle. Just be careful, some lookalikes are poisonous, like the Nipple Fruit. Learn more below.

Today we’re visiting with Fran Cohen who gardens in Rhode Island:

A constant, old-fashioned garden favorite! Hollyhocks have been universally admired for hundreds of years. They are stately, majestic, towering plants that add beauty wherever they are grown. What other plant has such a stately habit or so many transparent, lovely colors In single plants or masses against walls or buildings, in groups at the back or rear of the perennial border, interspersed with low shrubbery or in bold masses along drives or walks, they are alike effective Many delicate plants will give their fullest effects the first year, so they are planted to advantage in the newly made garden when the trees and shrubs are low. The general effect is too bare of color and foliage.

The pear grown in Britain is the European Pear which derives from Pyrus communis, native of the temperate parts of Europe and the western part of southern Asia as far as the Himalayas. In America some varieties are grown which are hybrids between the European Pear (as represented by ‘William’s Bon Chrdtien’, known in America as ‘Bartlett’) and Pyrus serotina, the Japanesesand pear.

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?

You can submit your garden poems to the webmaster.

Anyone in search of planting ideas for their garden in the colder months is spoilt for choice when it comes to sources of inspiration. Up and down Britain there are sterling examples of gardens planted for winter interest: Cambridge University Botanic Garden boasts one of the earliest; Wakehurst Place is home to one of the more recent; then there’s Bodnant, Dunham Massey, the Savill Garden – the list goes on. One thing they have in common though is that they’re all quite large, and gardeners could be forgiven for feeling they need a separate ‘winter area’ or hefty acreage to create anything worthwhile in their own plots. Not so, says David Jordan, senior gardener at Anglesey Abbey, who cares for its well-known Winter Garden and has a host of winter plants to recommend that will easily integrate into your existing garden.

Conifers may have a history reaching back 300 million years and cover wide stretches of the northern nemisphere but as garden plants they have long been out of favour. That may be changing. Innovative use at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show last year demonstrated how conifers can add structure to a garden in a relaxed way. 

Lipstick plant (Aeschynanthus radicans) is a popular house plant with an almost constant display of bright red, tubular flowers, that resemble lipsticks, against trailing, green foliage. Native to the rainforests of South East Asia, Aeschynanthus is an epiphytic plant, which means it doesn’t grow in the ground but instead is found hanging from tree branches, where it gets its moisture from rain water vapour. As a house plant in the UK, it grows well in a free-draining, peat-free potting mix.

The garden in February is a place of hope and promise of things to come, though it can still be bitterly cold. This is a month of tidying up in earnest and pruning the last of your deciduous shrubs or trees before their new leaves start to emerge.

While flowers are so often fleeting, foliage will keep a garden display going for many months. And this is especially true of plants with variegated foliage, splashed yellow, cream or white. It can induce one of those ‘Marmite moments’ – you either love it or hate it – but the choice is so wide that there is surely a variegated plant to suit all tastes and every location. These plants can be used to great effect to illuminate a shady spot, add contrast to an otherwise green backdrop, act as a focal point or provide year-round structural interest. Try one of our ten favourites and you may well be converted.