Are Fuchsia Plants Perennials or Annuals?

Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.

Georg Arends was a German nurseryman who bred many perennial plants. His business was successful until the second world war and has been regenerated to be one of the oldest in Europe. It still remains within the Arends family.

The Amazons of the summer border, hollyhocks tower on 1.5 to 2.5-metre stems from June to August. Their funnel-shaped blooms, which open in shades of ivory, lemon, pink, red, and plum, can often be seen peeping over a garden wall, basking in the sun. Bumblebees love to sup the nectar, and, as they do, become covered in a dusting of the flowers’ plentiful creamy pollen.

I recently had a call from a South Carolina resident who lost power for more than 24 hours and wanted to know whether the foods in her freezer would be safe to eat. This is a very common problem in South Carolina winters and could easily affect you in the coming months.

TALK ABOUT THE UNWELCOME WAGON! Bearers of bad tidings like this beware: Loving parents don’t like hearing that their kids are running wild, and especially not from the neighbors, “sorry.” This latest weekly utterance from Andre Jordan reminds me of another doodled pair of boots altogether (not the remarkably similar ones worn by the plant police above).

In the early 1990s, when I was working on a book called “The Natural Habitat Garden” with my friend Ken Druse, we traveled the country interviewing native-plant enthusiasts and photographing their gardens. One memorable stop was the home of Mrs. Lammot du Pont Copeland, outside Wilmington, which today is the botanic garden called Mt. Cuba Center, with more than 50 acres of display gardens on more than 500 acres of natural land.I’d never seen native terrestrial orchids before, or the vivid red and yellow wildflower called Spigelia marilandica anywhere, and that day I learned that some discerning and forward-thinking experts such as Mt. Cuba’s first horticulture director, the great Dick Lighty, were already busy selecting “better” forms of native plants for garden use–a trend that has accelerated and become one of the hottest areas of contemp

Karen Perkins has since 2009 owned Garden Visions Epimediums, a small retail mail-order nursery located in rural central Massachusetts, and founded in 1997 by Darrell Probst. She’s also open for visits and in-person shopping a couple of spectacular weeks each May during Epimedium peak season.Read along as you listen to the March 11, 2019 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).epimediums for shade gardens, with karen perkinsQ. I wish

That means more and more I’m layering native plants into my landscape, but which ones among the ones tagged “native” do the very best job? You’ve probably heard the word “nativar,” as in a cultivar of a native plant, but what does it mean and how effective are these often showier cultivated varieties at supporting wildlife? I asked Doug Tallamy, professor of entomology at University of Delaware and author of “Bringing Nature Home” and “The Living Landscape,” to help me understand more about this important subject.We talked about what a cultivar change–bigger flowers, maybe, or colorful leaves, or smaller overall stature–actually does to a plant from the point of view of insects. And I learned about a beta version of

It got me thinking formal.The Mt. Cuba press release described the redesign of a formal garden originally created in the 1940s to complement the estate’s impressive Colonial Revival home (one that’s now on the National Register).  And the photos looked inspired by a proper English-style mixed border–except the headline and captions all made it clear: the new plant palette is n

I had to shut up and turn the mic over to Ken, an award-winning garden author and photographer of more books than I can count or apparently write myself. And he began (jokingly) like this:Ken: “Hello and welcome to ‘A Way to Garden. I’m your visiting host, Ken Druse. I’m the author of, as someone said, soon to be 20 books on gardening, and our guest, our special guest today is someone who is familiar to all listeners to the radio show and the podcast and visitors to Margaret

In his new book, “The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees” (affiliate link), he makes the case more strongly than ever, with twists and turns and the tales of all the creatures we depend on, who depend on the genus Quercus.Doug Tallamy is well-known to most every gardener as a longtime leading voice speaking in the name of native plants. His 2007 book, “Bringing Nature Home,” was for many of us, an introduction into the entire subject of the unbreakable link between native plants and native wildlife. He followed up wi

“Every day, the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world,” she writes.Margaret Renkl—gardener, lifelong student of nature, and writer—lives and gardens in Nashville, Tennessee. Each Monday, her opinion column appears in “The New York Times,” billed under the loose rubric “Flora, fauna, politics and c