Tis the season for houseplant anxiety
We’re getting better at choosing outdoor plants that resist drought and disease, and we try to maintain insect-friendly gardens that would only be hurt by human intervention in the form [...]
Elizabeth Licata
Want to get in the spirit? Try a garden center
One of my favorite garden center shopping expeditions occurs after the garden has been put to bed. (And by that, I mean that I’ve started my four month-period of ignoring [...]
Ranters’ Roundtable: Trends
Welcome to our first informal roundtable, in which various Ranters opine on garden-related issues. We chose trends for the inaugural discussion, because a few of us had just received interesting [...]
Don’t worry, plant bulbs
That’s the title of a talk I gave recently for a suburban/rural gardening club, though maybe it didn’t apply. They all seemed like longtime spade-wielding warriors. Very few of them [...]
Since when did annuals become perennials?
It sure seems that way. So many in my online gardening group have already filled their windowsills, basements, and (increasingly) greenhouses with coleus, begonias, geraniums, petunias, impatiens—you name it, they’re [...]
I know: just kick everybody off Facebook but the gardeners
Gardeners may occupy one of the more benign sectors of social media. I was thinking of this after seeing headlines citing “indisputable harm,” “rage and misinformation,” and “choosing growth over [...]
When is it OK to settle?
Why should we settle? There are many reasons why most of us do. We compromise or we accept the lack of one thing for the abundance of another thing. I [...]
Philly show to stay outside in 2022
You can thank COVID. When I was at this show last June (Wambui Ippolito’s Etherea is shown above), the few staffers I talked to seemed to indicate they’d be back [...]
Goldenrod has its place in the civilized garden
In recent years, I have found even more reasons not to bother with the standard autumn plantings of mums one sees everywhere—stiff bunches of them on front porches, usually surrounded [...]
The eternal optimism of the stubborn gardener
This happens in my online group all the time. Gardeners post images of pathetic, clearly ailing, sometimes two-thirds dead shrubs, perennials, and annuals all the time. Who knows how long [...]
Stinzen me not
It started with a media release that I was about to delete, but first I needed to google a term I’d never heard before: stinzen gardens. The release concerned bulb [...]
No rest for the late summer gardener
Gardening takes no prisoners at this time of year, especially when it comes to patio containers. Yes, the weather is mellow and balmy and it’s so pleasant just to sit [...]