19 of the Best Vines for Vibrant Summer Color

Hanging baskets bring gardens up to eye level, making a garden feel fuller and more complete. On the porch they create an immediate sense of welcome, while plants hanging outside windows create a connection between the indoor and outdoor worlds. Use them to dress up walls or decorate tree branches. The best plants for hanging baskets take advantage of their heightened locations, with trailing stems that cascade over a container’s edges. They also stand up to the challenging conditions of container life. Container plants need consistent moisture. Locate hanging baskets close to a water source and consider attaching a watering wand to the hose to extend your reach. Drip irrigation also works well for containers. Hanging baskets will likely need watering every day in the heat of summer. Try combining several varieties with similar needs, and experiment to find the best mix for your porch or patio.

No other plant native to South Carolina has such fragrant and beautiful spring blooms and stunning fall color as the witch-alders. Fothergilla was named after Dr. John Fothergill, an English physician and gardener who funded the travels of John Bartram through the Carolinas in the 1700’s. These beautiful shrubs have been planted in both American and English gardens for over 200 years, including gardens of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Want to brighten up a shady spot in your summer annual containers? Caladiums are an excellent choice. Due to their insignificant flowers, caladiums are grown for their colorful foliage. The leaf colors range in a wide variety of red, pink, white, and green combinations with contrasting leaf margins.

The pioneering American landscape architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said: “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” Aside from hiding things, vines are great for vertical accents. Unfortunately, perennial vines tend to have a shorter flowering period, and once planted, you are stuck with them forever unless you dig them up and plant something else. I do not mean this in a negative way; I love many of the perennial vines and have several in my landscape, but you may want to add some annual vines to your garden palette that can bloom over several months during the growing season.

Do you have a chain link fence you’d like to hide? Cover it with evergreen vines. Evergreen vines are not only a great way to cover an eyesore, but they can also add vertical interest to your garden and even serve as a living privacy screen. Many of them have showy flowers, some even fragrant.

E. palustris, as its species name reveals, is a marsh-type plant, so wet and heavy soils are no problem for it (though it doesn’t seem to require them). Most spurges are finicky about such conditions. Not this one. It gets to between 2 and 3 feet tall and at least as wide.I grow seven or eight other Euphorbias, including the basic polychroma, its newer, red-foliage variant called ‘Bonfire,’ and the fiery-colored one called E. griffithii ‘Dixter’ [above]. In California, mail-order Digging Dog Nursery has a good list of spurges, but not palustris. I swore I got my most recent generation of plants at Forestfarm, but I don’t see it in their current list. Hmmm….how about Annie’s Annuals?The hardest thing about growing spurges is cutting them back,

Before we get started, the BirdNote backstory: In 2002, the then-executive director of Seattle Audubon heard a short public-radio show called StarDate. “We could do that with birds,” she thought. In 2005 the idea became a two-minute, seven-day-a-week public-radio “interstitial” (short program) that recently caught my ear. I asked BirdNote to help answer the recent questions you had asked me. (In case you missed installment 1, we tackled How do birds make themselves at home—even in winter? Week 2 was about birds on the move: the miracle of hummingbird migration, and on flying in formation. Week 3: on daring behavior, such as when a mob of small birds chase after a bigger one, or a woodpecker drums on my house.)Parts of Ellen’s answers below are in 2-minute audio clips to stream (all in the green links–or you can read the transcripts at those links if you prefer):Q. How long do birds live? Can you give some examples that hint at their lifespans?A. A

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

From 2005 to 2020, Bruce was the director of Rutgers Gardens, the botanical garden for Rutgers University. He’s currently the State Program Leader for Home and Public Horticulture with the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, and a longtime instructor in the landscape architecture program at Rutgers.We covered natives from shad and sourwood to pawpaw and even Franklinia, plus imports, all with a wide range of qualities to recommend them (that’s the Rutgers-bred kousa dogwood ‘Scarlet Fire,’ above).Read along as you listen to the June 7, 2021 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTu

Planting a hedge is one of the friendliest ways to put a border around a property.Unlike fences, shrubs take time to grow

Most likely native to Southeast Asia, colocasia (Colocasia esculenta, Zones 7b–12) is used by many gardeners for its large, tropical-looking foliage. This plant also has a long history of being used in cooking. Visitors to Hawaii are often treated to poi, a starchy Polynesian edible food paste made from its rootlike corm. Common names of colocasias include taro, eddo, dasheen, and elephant’s ear. Elephant’s ear is the most commonly used common name, but that can be confusing because plants called elephant’s ear come from several different genera, including Colocasia, Alocasia, and Xanthosoma, all of which are members of the arum family (Araceae). While there are several different species of colocasia, cultivars and hybrids of Colocasia esculenta are the main ones you will find being sold in garden centers to home gardeners.

Discover the finest selection of Vining Herbs, popular for their cascading foliage and aromatic flavors. You can grow these in hanging baskets, trellises, or pots!