Question of the Week – Morning Glory Prominent Caterpillar

With garden openings over for 2024, my ramblings around the garden involve a combination of “this is gorgeous!”, “aren’t we fortunate?”, “thank goodness that’s over” and “how can I improve this?”. Already thoughts have turned to potential ‘tweaks’, nothing major, and ways to improve things I don’t feel have really worked – perhaps I will write a post on them in due course…

Image: Hampton Court Flower Festival. Credit: RHS

Raised garden beds are an excellent choice for gardeners looking to enhance their growing space. The best raised garden beds offer benefits, such as improved soil conditions, better pest control, and easier maintenance. Our expertise at Savvy Gardening stems from years of hands-on gardening in raised beds and thorough research, ensuring that our recommendations are practical and reliable. We’ve narrowed our favorites to a list of six. We meticulously evaluated various factors, including durability, material quality,

What is wrong with these blueberries?

When you see a caterpillar on dill in your garden—or other plants—you may be startled, grossed out, or annoyed that your plant is being systematically decimated. I get excited. Because I know it’s a black swallowtail caterpillar (Papilio polyxenes) that’s going to turn into a beautiful butterfly. And that butterfly is going to become one of many valuable pollinators in my garden. I see a few types of swallowtail butterflies fluttering about my property, landing on various annuals and perennials. They are am

Patrick Biller

This year Chelsea Flower Show was full of interesting trees and shrubs with lots of dreamy woodland-edge planting in dappled light underneath leafy canopies. Native trees such as hawthorns, hazels and silver birch were the favoured choices in many of the show gardens, with a mixture of native and non-native ornamental plants selected for resilience and sustainability. In Ula Maria’s Forest Bathing Garden, white foxgloves, cow parsley and other umbellifers like Baltic parsley (Cenolophium denudatum) and valerian (Valeriana officinalis) were mixed with the simple shade-loving grass Melica altissima ‘Alba’ while Tom Stuart-Smith showcased intricate tapestries of interesting foliage in different shapes and textures. In other gardens, orange was a popular colour in many shades, from deep rusty orange irises to pale orange geums, especially in Ann Marie-Powell’s exuberant Octavia Hill Garden. As always, the Grand Pavilion is the ideal place to discover new and interesting plants showcased by some of the country’s leading nurseries.

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The HGIC Staff recently toured the Festival of Flower Topiary Displays in Greenwood, SC. The topiaries will be on display through July 8th. Plan a visit!

Jasmit Singh Rangr, a Berkeley-based architect, founder of Rangr Studio, and a lecturer in architecture at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, is technically responsible for building his family’s stylish, minimal, cost-conscious home near the Grizzly Peak summit in the Berkeley Hills. But the behind-the-scenes mastermind who made it possible is his wife, Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, a nonprofit, public interest environmental law firm. Anyone familiar with the area’s cutthroat real estate market won’t be surprised to hear that the search for a vacant, buildable lot in one of the most coveted neighborhoods in the West required Dillen to use all of the skills that make her a great lawyer: creativity, a knack for analysis and research, perseverance, and the art of persuasion.

As the sun sets, your new petunias start to emit an otherworldly green gleam in your garden. The scientists behind biotechnology startup Light Bio are now selling Firefly Petunias—a genetically modified version of the petunia that glows gently in the dark.

Now that summer has finally arrived, it’s time for you to heed your call of the wild and head outside. Of course, you’re not chilling outside alone: You’ll have all your plants, grilling tools, and outdoor decor essentials keeping you company. That said, finding the right outdoor furniture to suit your space can be admittedly tricky. Not only do you have to find pieces that are designed with Mother Nature in mind—and hopefully don’t follow these key backyard blunders—but you’ll want to find items that look good, too. (Just like what’s inside your home, outdoor furniture can be surprisingly pricey, so it’s in your best interest to find furniture that ticks off all of the boxes.)