What Is Oak Wilt and How Do You Treat It?

Pear trees are favorites of home orchardists for countless reasons.Mouths are amused by that sign

Are you looking at plants in your garden and wondering why they aren’t flowering?

T HERE IS LITTLE CHANCE THAT ANYBODY on this dirt road is stealing my garden-design ideas; they don’t want to go stark raving and have to take care of all this stuff. But our doodling friend Andre’s right: Cookie-cutter gardens all in a row would be no fun, and the garden’s a place for each of us to express our individuality, not try to recreate someone else’s picture or point of view.

APPARENTLY MRS. ANDRE’S TOMATOES succumbed to “tiny insect things that will not leave our garden alone,” we hear this week from Himself, who very sweetly shared the actual sympathy postcard he drew for Herself on the occasion of her lost tomatoes.

I‘LL SHOW YOU MINE IF… (and actually, I have been doing so, with regularity). My garden, that is.

I N A GOOD SPRING, BELOVED PLANTS COME BACK. Not everybody, of course; some just can’t find their way home.

YOU KNOW THE WAY A BEST FRIEND wants to know the details of your latest intrigue, based on whatever the friend likes most about objects of intrigue herself. (Forgive me, gentlemen; just swap all the pronouns in this post to suit.) “How are his manners?” she’ll ask, and “His sense of humor? His smile?” Here’s what I’d ask if I were your best friend and you had your eye on someone new, especially in the perennial department: How are his leaves? It’s leaves after all that dictate a plant’s character, hanging on as they do longer than most any flower.

Ellen Blackstone of the BirdNote team (who describes her job there as “writes/edits/finds photos/posts to the website/sits in on recordings”—sort of like my job at A Way to Garden) was kind and patient enough to be our teacher. Remember, parts of each answer are in the 2-minute clips you can stream (all in the green links–or you can read the transcripts of each episode at those links if you prefer). Here we go:nest, versus roostQ. The topic of where birds prefer to live, and especially the role of the nest in their lifestyles, seemed to provoke my readers’ curiosity—and also probably some misconceptions. What’s “home” to a bird? A. The great number of migratory species are all away from their nests–some as far as a different continent–during the nonbreeding season. Even among the residents, the majority of birds do not use their nest as a home but only a place to raise their young.Exceptions would be some hole-nesters that roost in their cavities throughout the year, but they are a real minority. Those might be chickadees or their cousi

FULL SUN (or light shade in hotter zones), and well-drained soil that’s high in organic matter is the basic regimen (though the sweetbay magnolia, M. virginiana, can also take a wet spot). Give the others those requirements, plus a light layer of aged organic mulch, and they generally will thrive. Fertilizing isn’t needed, says Andrew. (At Scott they only mulch the circles of trees in lawn areas, using a combination of leaf compost and one-year-old composted wood chips.)Magnolias are not the easiest to plant under, however, because of their fleshy, moisture-hogging root systems.  “Some plants that can take dry shade will make a go of it,” he says, suggesting Epimedium, or Asarum, or Christmas fern. Among bulbs, try Scilla, or Chionodoxa, or even toadlilies (Tricyrtis), he recommends.Magnolia grandiflora, the so-called Southern magnol

Yes, we know the labels on various commercial nursery plants, like a coneflower, or lupine, or Coreopsis, may say “native,” but keen gardeners probably have figured out that that’s often used quite generically in marketing, perhaps implying U.S. native, or maybe regional native at best.As I consciously add more natives to my garden, I wanted to learn how to get a little more precise than that. Who better at the time to ask for guidance than Elizabeth Farnsworth, Senior Research Ecologist for what was then called New England Wild Flower Society, now Native Plant Trust? No matter where you live, Elizabeth helped map out a strategy for learni

Many companies ship extra-early, based on rough frost-date estimates for each area that may not be exactly what’s going on at your place, but is that really when I want the starts to arrive? I asked for advice from Alley Swiss of Filaree Farm, a longtime certified-organic farmer in Okanogan, Washington, whose main crops—garlic, shallots and potatoes—are favorites in my garden, too.(You might recall the popular garlic-growing Q&A Alley and I did together, and our later garlic-growing piece in my column in “The New York Times.” I’ve learned a lot from our ongoing conversations–including that it’s OK to wait a little while for the seed potatoes to arrive.)how to grow potatoes, with alley swissQ. When is the right time to plant—is there a cue in nature to remind us, or a

Robert Gegear is an assistant professor of biology at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, whose research interests include the conservation of native pollination systems, floral evolution, and bumblebee ecology. He’s one of the founders of the Beecology citizen science project, with Worcester Polytechnic Institute, funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation. Begun in Massachusetts, it is now getting data from citizen contributors over a wider area, and welcomes photos of bumblebees on flowers from throughout North America.In our chat, I was surprised to learn that a bumblebee species may prefer a different plant for nectar than it does as a source of pollen, and also what role pollen serves for the bees (not just for the plants they pollinate). And that though there are a lot of lists out there of “bee plants,” many of them aren’t based on research—but rather on less-formal observations of