In defense of palms
Recently, Ranter Allen Bush drew our attention to an NPR segment on the problem with palm trees in Florida. In Miami Beach, they make up almost 60% of the tree [...]
Elizabeth Licata
More gardening-adjacent occupations
Neither of these are really hobbies, in my view. One is something almost everyone does on a regular basis and the other is used routinely by professional growers and others [...]
Closing the gap
Last week someone commented that I—well, the whole site—was crotchety and out of date. I didn’t really mind; we do voice strong opinions and when people don’t agree they can [...]
Let there be light
Thank you, cannabis growers and houseplant collectors. I’m going to assume that it must be in part due to the increasing popularity—well, explosion— of this type of gardening that we [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]