pairing clematis with proper partners, with linda beutler of rogerson clematis collection

Living and working in northwestern Oregon, garden designer Wesley Younie is no stranger to dealing with challenging environments. When presented with this garden’s elevation changes, drainage management, and extreme climate conditions, he devised a plan that addresses it all—along with a specific functional wish list from the homeowners. Want to know which plants he used? Here are the plant IDs for this beautiful, sustainable landscape.

If you’re anything like us, then you love your dog and want to include them in as many of your daily activities as possible. Every dog owner has experienced the joy, frustration, and laughter caused by our four-legged friends who decide to help us complete a task and, in most cases, create even more chaos as a result.

IKEA

You can help keep your family and our waterways safe by properly disposing of unwanted or expired medications. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the proper disposal of medications can prevent:

YES, OF COURSE I know about the more backbreaking ways to make a new bed, but lately I confess I’ve been relying more and more upon the magic of recyclables: newspaper and cardboard to be specific.

Lee’s tips for growing pawpaw or American persimmon couldn’t make it sound more appealing, or simple:“Plant it, water it, and keep weeds and deer away for a couple of years, and then do nothing,” he says. No fancy pruning (like those apples crave), no particular pests–and a big, juicy harvest. More details on how to choose which variety to grow are included in the highlights from the April 29, 2013 edition of my public-radio show and podcast, transcribed below. To hear the entire interview, use the streaming player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).growing ame

A NY FLOWER WOULD BE HARD-PRESSED TO COMPETE with the two most colorful ferns in the garden here, which have been showing off since the first crozier poked through the soil surface in early May and won’t stop till very late fall. No wonder I grow so many Japanese painted ferns and autumn ferns; they make shade gardening look easy, adding heavy doses of purple and silver or coral and gold, respectively, and never asking for so much as a deadheading in return.Japanese painted fern (Athyrium niponicum ‘Pictum’, Zones 5-8) is well-known to most gardeners the last decade, a showy thing with varying proportions and intensities of silvery-gray and purple coloration on its parts.

COME AND JUST TAKE A WALK with me. No big plant lesson, nothing to prune or weed or sow.

That’s not to say that C. tangutica cultivars aren’t beasts of a vine, too. As with C. terniflora, I cut these back hard in early spring, to less than a foot above the ground. They nevertheless produces a rampant amount of growth, to more than 10 feet tall, and around mid- to late August start to open up an increasing number of charming yellow bells: lemons with their peels unfurled in quarters. (If I didn’t hack it in spring, but simply clean out the dead stuff a little, it starts blooming for me in June.)I know I’m being imprecise, but frankly I cannot tell several of the good tangutica cultivars apart. I think mine’s‘Gravetye Variety,’ with deepest maroon anthers, and other good cultivars to look for include ‘Bill MacKenzie’ and ‘Golden Harvest.’ My tangutica type doesn’t cover itself in the sweet-scented froth of flowers of C. terniflora, a Japanese native that’s got a reputation as a terrible thug, or like its native American, far b

I’ve mentioned my penchant for growing vines up and over otherwise-dull shrubbery, and in doing so not long ago I guess I got to realizing I was barely making use of a fraction of the opportunities.An accidental favorite of mine is ‘Duchess of Albany’ (above, and detail, bottom) a Victorian era hybrid of C. texensis. I say accidental because I thought I was buying its cousin, another texensis type with much deeper-colored flowers called ‘Gravetye Beauty,’ named at the turn of the 20th Century for the home of William Robinson, the gre

Adam and I talked about not just the Japanese types, but also other garden-sized maples for adding interest in every season and garden situation–in pots or the high shade of woodland gardens, to full-sun locations.my maple q&a with adam wheelerQ. When I was at Broken Arrow recently, there were many choice things to look at—but I kept noticing the maples you offer, particularly. How many do you grow?A. In the collection at the nursery, I suspect we have 150 or 200 different maples, and really that’s the tip of the iceberg with this genus.Q. There are a lot of native A

I’ve told you how to do this before with various shrubs, to get two seasons of interest from the same space: with Clematis, and also the oddball called Codonopsis.After seeing Brushwood Nursery’s selection of vines at the Trade Secrets show last Saturday near me (just a few of the astonishing 400 or so in the online catalog), I’d have to say proprietor Dan Long has something for every shrub, and then some. Wow. Though I had already added four or five new clematis to the garden the last two weeks, I bought five more from Brushwood’s booth, good-sized plants for very fair prices, and tomorrow they will get their homes here.And then I went back to my place and emailed the ver