Herb Garden in Patio Table

Today we’re off to the Mohawk Valley in central New York State to visit Lee’s beautiful garden.

Colorful ferns can be an excellent addition to any garden or indoor plant collection. These plants are characterized by their beautiful, vibrant fronds ranging from shades of pink, red, yellow, and even purple.

 Part of Tom Massey's

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Garden Sprouts is a program I run at the South Carolina Botanical Garden that is designed for preschoolers and caregivers. This class takes place once a week for three months every spring and fall. The goal is to share age-appropriate nature-based activities with children, who are mostly three to five years old, but sometimes younger or older. Over time I have learned the caregivers also learn things they never knew, enjoy the activities immensely, and are able to connect more deeply to the natural world through this program. The structure of this hour-long program is three-fold, we begin inside with a book related to the theme of the day, a walk or outdoor activity, and finally a craft. In this blog, I would like to share some of the books, outdoor activities, and crafts we have done in this class.

Want to add a tropical flair to your garden this spring? Elephant ears will add a bold statement to a filtered sun or high shade spot. These striking “drama queens” of the garden may be either in genera Colocasia or Alocasia. The easiest way to tell these beauties apart is that colocasias (Colocasia esculenta) will have leaves that point downward, and alocasia (Alocasia species) leaves will point upward. Depending on the species or cultivar of each genus, the size can range from 3 to 10 feet tall and 2 to 10 feet in width. Both types of elephant ears are native to the tropical regions of Southeastern Asia.

As summer fades and fall’s cool temperatures and moist days arrive, this is a fantastic time for planting perennials, shrubs, and trees. Under these conditions, plants get time to establish roots without the stresses of summer heat and dryness. Luckily, this is also time for the South Carolina Botanical Garden’s semi-annual plant sale. As well as offering great quality plants of all kinds, plant sales are our major fundraiser. Through them, you support our operations and the enhancements made to this unique and free public garden. The catalog is available online for pre-sale planning Preview the Catalog (PDF). Garden staff, volunteers, and Clemson University students will be available at the sale to help with plant selection. In addition, several partner organizations set up booths at the sale to answer questions about gardening-related topics and activities. To find out who will be here this year, check the catalog. For additional information, please contact Misty Shealy, Nursery Manager, at [email protected].

This heirloom grain, together with the skilled knowledge and forced labor of West Africans and their descendants, made South Carolina very, very rich. From 1720 to the outbreak of the Civil War, rice was the most economically valuable crop for this state. White landowners, who thought rice would do well in the low country, themselves lacked practical knowledge of rice cultivation. Instead, they paid a premium to slave traders to capture and transport laborers from the well-established rice region of West Africa to Carolina. During the 18th century, many enslaved people brought into Charleston came from this rice-growing area. These people and their descendants created the Gullah-Geechee culture in the low country.

As a new year begins, educators at the South Carolina Botanical Garden at Clemson University are excited for a new season of classes and events for all ages. Our entire new calendar is here.

The boys and I extend a huge thanks to Adrian, whom you can meet in the videos he’s been creating on The Post’s website. I loved this video about tomatoes, in which he combined visits with DC-area community gardeners and with our mutual friend Amy Goldman, the heirloom tomato queen who lives not far from me. Adrian’s recent story on Amy is a must-read as well.Also thanks to my very dear friend Erica Berger, who performed trick photography during the Washington Post photo shoot, so that (finally) a photo of Mother of the Frogboys that’s more recent than me at age 3 appears here.  I didn’t see any of Erica’s photos that ran in the paper, or others from her shoot including this one, on The Post’s website…just the story itself is there…

THE FLYER PIQUED MY INTEREST: Dan Benarcik, part of the creative team at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, Pennsylvania (a must visit!), would be lecturing nearby about “The Art & Craft of the Garden,” and how to personalize a garden using artistic elements, found artifacts, and ornamental containers. I quickly got a ticket—you can, too, for the June 16 event, including garden tours and a garden market, in Spencertown, New York—but also asked Dan to share some of his ideas and images (including the bromeliad-artemisia- urn-and-melianthus moment at Chanticleer, above) with us, no matter whether we can attend. A Q&A with this enormously talented plantsman and garden artist.

This is the 12th of our monthly Urgent Garden Question Q&A shows, and we thank you for your support—and for your questions most of all. You can keep them coming any time in comments or by email, using the contact form, or at Facebook.Read along as you listen to the Jan. 1, 2018 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).Plus: Enter to win a copy of Ken’s n