As Digital Content Editor Christine Alexander explains, pollinators play a vital role in our ecosystem and we should all be doing our part to support their populations:
21.07.2023 - 22:59 / awaytogarden.com
I GENERALLY DON’T LIKE MY CONIFERS SHORN or buy them very big (too uptight for me, and too expensive). But when I met this concolor fir (above) one Christmas at the local nursery, where it was on display at the entry to their holiday shop, I knew we were meant for each other…despite those very issues. Abies concolor ‘Candicans’ is the third in a series on beloved conifers.I have two other Abies concolor here (I know, there’s evidence of my former“everything in threes” insanity again), the other two grown naturally, unshorn, and therefore quite different-looking. I won’t tell you what I paid for the big guy, all thick and a perfect pyramid and already near 10 feet tall when he came to me to live on my hillside of a backyard, among the crabapples and a giant island of ornamental grasses. The others were scrawny little things, maybe 3 feet high, though each is more than 15 tall now.
The white, or concolor fir, a Western American native species ranging from Colorado to Southern California, New Mexico and into Mexico, can grow to 100 feet in the wild, apparently, but in a garden setting you are more likely to see it get to 30 or maybe 50 feet in time, and half as wide.
Its long needles, which are particularly silvery-blue in the cultivar ‘Candicans,’ curve outward and up. Unlike the Colorado blue spruce, Picea pungens glauca, the fir’s foliage is soft to the touch, far less stiff. It is also far less trouble-prone than the Colorado blue spruce, which if you’ve encountered with a case of spruce gall or spider mites or the canker that can affect lower branches, you will know how disfiguring these issues can be. Stated simply: If you want a big blue pyramidal conifer in Zones 4-7 this fir is it (just not in heavy clay, which itAs Digital Content Editor Christine Alexander explains, pollinators play a vital role in our ecosystem and we should all be doing our part to support their populations:
It’s well known that the housing market is so competitive right now, but prospective home buyers aren’t the only ones hurting—renters are, too. According to personal finance website WalletHub, inflation has impacted rental prices, and 2022 saw the second-highest price growth in decades with a 6.2% year-over-year increase.
For those who are looking to buy a home for the first time, the feat can seem like quite the hurdle. With housing prices and interest rates still high, and a competitive market, it’s tough out there! And the number of first-time home buyers are dropping, too, because of those high prices—according to personal finance site WalletHub, 26% off home purchases were made by first-time home buyers in 2022, down from 34% the previous year.
Does Firebush Attract Hummingbirds? – If you have this question in your mind, then this article will clear all your doubts!
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.
St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, is a popular celebration in the United States, due to the number of Americans, 10.5%, with Irish heritage. One million Irish emigrated to North America, Australia, or other parts of Great Britain in the mid-1800s because of the potato disease now known as late blight. Late blight, caused by the water mold, Phytophthora infestans, destroyed the Irish potato crops in 1845 through 1849 and caused the Irish Potato Famine. Another one million people died from hunger or disease.
After my first baby was born, I came to realize that with parenting comes advice. A lot of it. Advice on how to get the baby to sleep. Advice on how to give the baby a bath. And CONSTANTLY – advice on how to feed the baby. It comes from every direction, most often from your mother-in-law and frequently from complete strangers without children. Sometimes this well-intended advice is good and is followed by “because the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends it”. But sometimes it is not so good and is supported with rationale like “because I fed it to you, and you turned out just fine”.
The plant was first discovered near Vladivostok in the 1920s, above the treeline, where it survived the deep cold of Siberian winters, making it a Zone 3-hardy creature, supposedly.Although it is a groundcover species, don’t expect it to grow in the dark: That was the mistake made at first when Microbiota reached the American market in any numbers maybe a decade ago. Saying a plant can handle some shade is different from saying it’s a shade plant; this one wants half a day of sun or more, I think, and wholesalers who propagate a lot of it say sun to part sun on their labels. In warmer zones, protection from afternoon sun is important, and in fact Microbiota isn’t a fan of the hottest zones at all.Though Microbiota (seen above in winter color) is said to have few if any pest and disease problems, I will confess to this: I have killed a number of them, without ever
Quick backstory: You may remember Charley, co-author of my most-used field guide “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” from our recent interview about galls and leaf mines, two of his specialties.(I’m giving away two more copies; enter by commenting in the form way down at the bottom of this page, after reading the entry details in the tinted box just before that. The book can help you to know what you are seeing when you look closer, too—kind of like always having Charley by your side.)When that story ran, Charley had noticed a photo I used to accompany it–of a squiggly “leaf mine” I’d observed in my Asian-native big-leaved perennial called Petasites. He’d wondered if it was caused by the insect that feeds in a few different genera in the tribe Senecioneae (including some native American botanical cousins of Petasites). Why don’t you come try to find out, I’d suggested—and while you’re here, why don’t we have a
A NOTHER SELECTION FROM MY EARLIEST PROSE, circa 1961, unearthed in a bout of housecleaning here this winter. This one earned me a star (which seems just right for a penmanship exercise about space travel), and marked the day the first American, Alan Shepard (who in 1971 would walk on the moon) went up in space.
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,
These non-native “ladybugs,” introduced by the Department of Agriculture to help combat certain agricultural pests, have made themselves right at home in America—and in my house, too. In fall, the south-facing side of the exterior can be teeming with patches of them, as they look for places to tuck into and overwinter. The USDA imported lady beetles from Japan as early as 1916 as a beneficial insect, to gobble up unwanted pests on forest and orchard trees, but it was probably later releases, in the late 1970s and early 80s in the Southeast, that took hold. Today, multicolored Asian lady beetles have made themselves completely at home around the United States, easily adapting to regions as diverse as Louisiana, Oregon, and mine in New York State.