You have been watering that patch for two weeks. You are giving it more and more water, the way you were taught to water the lawn. And the problem is getting worse. This is your first clue here. Drought-stressed lawns usually react positively to watering….
Not a thing in the garden looks as if it is dying yet. And that is how the illusion is created. The pelargoniums continue to flower. The coleus brags in colors. The salvia is as tall as it has never been, and looking from the…
October is the finest month in the flower garden. August is when you earn it. Not give up — not yet. But there is a quality to a flower bed in late summer that every gardener recognizes: the slight sag of stems that held themselves…
There’s a reason so many gardeners fall for delphiniums the moment they see them in a catalog. Those towering spikes of blue look like something out of an English cottage garden — tall, elegant, impossible to ignore. You plant them, you wait a full year…
You might almost admire them, if they weren’t eating your roses. That flash of metallic green and copper catching the July morning light — genuinely jewel-like, if we are being honest with ourselves — is beautiful for precisely the half second before you count them….
Most gardeners sow foxglove, hollyhock, and sweet william in spring, right alongside their annuals. That’s exactly why so many of them never bloom. These are biennials — sow them in spring, and all you get by autumn is a rosette of leaves and a long…
I’m so excited because my English lavender is starting to bloom right now! Soon my garden will fill with its intoxicating fragrance, generous flower spikes and loads of bee, butterflies and other pollinators! If you too have this magical shrub in your garden, then you…
The moment those towering delphinium petals drop, your hands probably itch to grab the pruners and slice that fading stalk right down to the dirt. I completely understand the craving for a spotless flower bed. But taking a sharp blade and shearing a hollow botanical…
Did you enjoy your ball-like decorative allium blooms this year? From white to burgundy via blue and all shades of purple, from small to 12-inch large, their inflorescences are hard to miss in a garden… But my real question is: do you want another spectacular…
Why do some lilacs completely steal the show every spring? Is it because of some secret fertilizer? The perfect soil? Or maybe they just like the neighbor’s garden better than yours? Whichever the reason, if your shrub gave you nothing but a quiet mountain of…