‘the great dixter cookbook,’ with aaron bertelsen

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.

This archipelago of some 140 islands basks in the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic. The islands’ powdery, white, sandy beaches and warm microclimate, give them a sense of being much further from the rest of Great Britain than they really are.

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.

Since the book “Planting in a Post-Wild World” came out in 2015, co-authored by Claudia West with Thomas Rainer, I’ve been gradually studying their ideas and starting to have some light bulbs go off, on how to be inspired to put plants together in the ways that nature does, in layered communities.Claudia joined me on the July 17, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast to about some of the practical, tactical aspects of plant community-inspired designs that we can app

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

Click on the first thumbnail to start the show, and toggle from slide to slide by using the arrows. Note: You may have to scroll to find the arrows below the verticals, in particular. Enjoy.What are all these images, and where did they come from suddenly? My beloved Nebraskan-English-Transplant correspondent explains (imagine this with an accent if you can):“My mum has begu

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.

The numbers on a fertilizer bag are the so-called N-P-K ratio, the percent of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash (or potassium, chemical symbol K) inside the bag. Simply speaking, nitrogen is for green growth; phosphorus is for roots, flowers, and fruit; potash is for general vigor and disease resistance. A so-called balanced fertilizer, often recommended in books, is one that has equal percentages of each element.With chemical fertilizers, the numbers are much higher than with organic formulations. A standard is 10-10-10 or 5-10-5, meaning there are those percentages of each element in the bag (the rest is filler). You won’t find those totals in any organic formulation. In fact, if the total of the three numbers on a so-called organic or natural bag adds up to more than 15, I’m suspicious. Unless blood meal—an organic material very high i

Long before I grew ‘Diablo’ (the name on its tag, but which I later learned is ‘Diabolo’) I brought a rooted cutting of the golden-leaf form of Physocarpus (above), called ‘Dart’s Gold,’ home from Western Hills Nursery in Northern California. Or at least I thought it was ‘Dart’s Gold.’But like ‘Diablo,’ my so-called ‘Dart’s Gold’ got really big in time, like 10 by 10 feet or even wider; the labels say otherwise, that it gets to just 5 feet or so. I suspect my gold one is just ‘Luteus,’ or maybe ‘Luteus’ and ‘Dart’s Gold’ are the same thing, who knows?

In the fall of 2016, Dr. Connally won a $1.6 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control to fund a four-year study, in coordination with the University of Rhode Island, to gauge the effectiveness of various tick control methods in the areas around people’s homes. She’ll tell us more about the angles being pursued, and also about self-care topics, from treated clothing to the use of topical repellents and more.Read along as you listen to the Dec. 11, 2017 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).backyard tick research, with dr. neeta connallyQ. A little context first: You’re in the Northeast, where a lot of the cases of Lyme in the United States occur, but there are multiple tick species around the nation. You

THIS LITTLE-KNOWN SPECIES (apparently first discovered and named by famed British plant explorer Andre Jordan) reminds me of all the plants I used to bid on at rare-plant auctions. The thinking always seemed to be that the harder it was to grow, the more valuable it was–and up went the bids, sky-high.

On my radio show and podcast, we talked about why having extra-early and extra-later bloomers—from spicebush to Clethra to goldenrods and more—mean important insects and even birds will choose not just to stop by your garden, but call it home and raise a family.Read along as you listen to the May 11, 2015 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).read/listen: choosing native plants,a q&a with broken arrow’s andy brandQ. I know that when the subject of native plants is raised, peopl