7 Best Black Dracaenas

Best places to see snowdrops 

If you’re as keen on growing tomatoes as I am you’ll be getting read to sow now. I sow them as early as February to grow inside and late March for plants to go out in the veg patch. Don’t panic if you’re late sowing, they do catch up, you’ll just be picking a little later.

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No garden is complete without at least a few containers for seasonal color. I always specify locations for planters when I create a new landscape design, with the intention of keeping them filled in every season. Although many gardeners keep their containers filled with annuals in summer and cut greenery in winter, there is another option. Planting a dwarf evergreen that can remain in its pot for several seasons will provide structure and texture every month of the year.

When it comes to sculptural form in the garden, it’s hard to compete with a well-grown agave (Agave spp. and cvs., Zones 7b–11). With sizes ranging from 6-inch rosettes to hulking 12-foot giants, there really is a perfect plant for every garden or container. Most are striking enough in their natural tones of green to blue, but some have raised the bar a bit higher, adding highlights of white and gold to the palette.

Selecting a perfect indoor plant gift is made easy with our Best Indoor Plants for Gifting! From the lucky Jade Plant to the low-maintenance Peace Lily, each plant, like Orchids or Poinsettias, offers unique qualities for meaningful gifts.

Fragrance in flowers is such a desirable attribute that it’s a perennial complaint of many gardeners that modern varieties of various plants, particularly roses, lack all or most of the fragrance of the older varieties. This is demonstrably untrue of many varieties, of course, yet there is a good deal of truth in the generalization. Some varieties are certainly much less fragrant than the ‘old-fashioned’ roses and a few seem to lack detectable fragrance, but, on the whole, a good modern variety will number fragrance among its qualities. Much depends, of course, upon the individual sense of smell, coupled with the ‘scent memory’ which all of us possess to some degree. It is, in fact, usually well developed and most of us are readily and instantaneously reminded by present scents of past incidents, places, and persons, and although the actual vocabulary of scent is limited, it is usually possible for us to describe a scent fairly accurately by comparing it with another. Thus it is quite usual for us to say that a flower has a lily-like fragrance, or that it smells like new-mown hay.

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A term which can be used to describe certain plant diseases which reveal themselves as black spots on the leaves. Some are quite startling in the color contrast with the green of the leaf, for example, black or tar spot on sycamore leaves. But the best known of all ornamental plant black spot diseases is that which affects roses, called rose black spot. In this, the spots are usually circular and well-defined but sometimes they are very diffuse and roughly follow the veins in a branched fashion. In the disease of delphiniums called black spot or black blotch, the black spots are of all sizes and very irregular shapes. In black spot disease of elm leaves the spots are shiny, coal black, and slightly raised.

Dive into a sea of laughter with this sea-riously good collection of ocean puns!

While painting a room isn’t necessarily a difficult DIY job, it’s not always easy—how many coats does one wall need again?

Some people get their kicks from designer labels, others from rummaging through flea shops, or collecting obscure Japanese comics, vintage tractors, handbags, dolls, beer-mats, Star Wars merchandise or whatever else. Me, I get mine from ordering seeds.