From Wine Box to Beautiful Planter

Flowering shrubs can grace your garden, adding color, interest and sometimes fragrance to the home landscape. For the biggest, showiest flowers, you’ll also need to take into account the sun exposure of the garden site. But never fear, there are flowering shrubs for landscaping that like sun and others that like shade.

One of my favorite things to do upcycle is tin cans and to make cool planters out of them ( like these popular gold crushed ones). I've been crushing tin cans again but this time to make a display outside my home that shows my house number too.

The ancient Chinese have cultivated Tree Peonies for over 1500 years. Prized specimens are and were grown for medicinal purposes as they contain glucocides and alkolides. The  imperial palace gardens had many specimens that became quite valuable.

I have been reading the Penguin Encyclopedia of Gardening which aims to provide ‘….an explanation of words used in a technical sense in a horticultural context in the UK and USA.’ Set out as an A to Z this resulting post, missing a thousand definitions, is unlikely to rank highly with search engines.

The box tree moth, Cydalima perspectalis, is a non-native moth that has recently been found in a nursery in South Carolina. Native to eastern Asia, the box tree moth has been present in Canada since November 2018. From August 2020 through May 2021, infested boxwood (Buxus sp.) plants were inadvertently shipped from a grower in Canada to several nurseries in the U.S.; a retail nursery in South Carolina received infested plants in May 2021. As of June 1, 2021, the South Carolina detection is being treated as a regulatory incident, and this pest is not thought to have escaped into the landscape. Clemson’s Department of Plant Industry is investigating plant shipments into and out of the South Carolina nursery to determine if infested material may have been inadvertently sold to homeowners and will be monitoring in and around the nursery to ensure this moth has not escaped. If populations are found, a survey and eradication effort will follow.

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.

I have grown a lot of viburnums over the years, and have pruned them at various times of year for one reason or another. Usually viburnums need relatively little pruning, assuming you planted the right cultivar in the right-sized space (for example, not ‘Mariesii’ among the doublefiles, shown, but ‘Watanabei’ if you only had a smallish area). Even the lightest form of pruning, the removal of spent flowers called deadheading, isn’t needed with most viburnums, since what you want is fruit after the flowers (unlike all that deadheading with lilacs, for instance, to prevent messiness).POOR PLANNING TO BLAMEMost of the pruning I’ve had to do on viburnums was because I didn’t leave enough room for the plant to reach its eventual size, and poor planning (meaning my impatience to have a filled-in garden) caught up with me in time. I have cut several viburnums to the ground or the

I spoke about some notable natives with my friend Andy Brand of Broken Arrow Nursery, with whom I often hosting half-day workshops in my Hudson Valley, New York, garden, when we focus on upping the beneficial wildlife quotient in your own backyard with better plants and better practices. Andy has been one of the experts I’ve pestered for ideas as I’ve been doing that in my own garden in recent years to good effect.Andy is manager of Connecticut-based Broken Arrow, and he’s a serious amateur naturalist, and founder of the Connecticut state butterfly association. (That’s a photo by Andy of a red-banded hairstreak on a Clethra blossom, top of page.) Learn where many familia

I first heard about “Bird Songs Bible: The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds,” edited by Les Beletsky, featuring sound from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and published by Chronicle Books, in this NPR segment last month. One caveat: The book-cum-boombox (birdbox?) ain’t cheap (cheep?) at $125.‘Millions Against Monsanto’ CampaignIWON’T ELABORATE OR START SHOUTING, but rather leave it at this: One of the things that scares me most is GMO crops, whether in the field or in our food. The Organic Consumers Union offers education, and also an advocacy program (aimed squarely at Monsanto, of course, whom they label “the biotech bully”) to make it easy for us all to add our names to the fight.

ISEEM TO BE A MAGNET for furry black creatures, a trend that I suppose started when the cat of my dreams adopted me all those years ago. This week, he and I have been visited by two other thick-coated types: the biggest caterpillar I have ever seen, Hypercompe scribonia (above, who will become the giant leopard moth), and a not-so-big (but big enough, thank you) American black bear, Ursus americanus, who completely terrorized resident fur-bearer Jack the Demon Cat in the overnight hours last night.

Since 1993, Scott has run Old House Gardens, the only American resource devoted exclusively to heirloom bulbs, many available nowhere else–older varieties that have been handed down for their enduring value and interest.After a degree from Columbia, Scott returned to Michigan to teach school and bought an 1870s fixer-upper house in Ann Arbor that led to an epiphany when he realized some of the plants outside it were hand-me-downs of gardeners past. He pursued a masters in historic preservation, worked as a landscape historian, and has taught landscape history at Eastern Michigan University.And most important for this discussion: Having that whole catalog of b

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE CONIFER, the “beautiful one” to your eye? I could only narrow my list down to 10, plant-mad person that I am, but with hints of the winter landscape in the cooler air, I’m thinking of just how important evergreens are. And not just to me. Coniferous trees and shrubs also provide important winter shelter for birds, and many small mammals depend on their seed, as do various bird species. Conifers’ value as nesting spots is another reason to plant more.