Richard Hawke is the Plant Evaluation Manager for the Chicago Botanic Garden, so it’s fair to say he knows a lot about plants. Recently I was interested to see a post he wrote for CBG’s blog entitled “What Are the Best Plants for Your Midwestern Garden?”
So the container gardening season has gotten off to a bumpy start, what with the Great Daffodil Disaster of 2017. Nonetheless, I took a few days off this week and I couldn’t restrain myself from filling the pots with spring flowers. Also, I started the year with some changes to my approach to flowering containers.
It is my contention that Pansies (Viola x wittrockiana) are underused, and Chrysanthemums overused, as fall annuals.
I had a happy reunion with the garden after Judy and I returned from our trip late Saturday afternoon. The first thing I noticed were bright swaths of yellow that seemed to dominate the area in front of the house. Yellow – sometimes clear and light, sometimes golden, or shading into orange.
In the Spring the front garden containers are full of Tulips underplanted with Sweet Alyssum (Lobularia maritima). Now that the Tulips are but a memory, though, I’ve devoted some time over the last couple of weeks to replanting with summer annuals. The results are OK, but less than inspiring. Perhaps this is because I didn’t …
It’s so easy to plant too early. The warm sun shines for a couple of days in a row and it can take great restraint not to rush out and plant tomatoes, basil, Caladiums, and other tender garden delights. Big box stores and some garden centers encourage such rashness with tempting displays of plants with …
In my last post I wrote about an article in the current issue of Gardens Illustrated called ‘100 Plants Every Gardener Should Grow’. While I took issue with the title, it has inspired me to do a much more modest list of my own. I want to stress up front that just because these plants …
Within a few days of each other, two gardening friends mentioned the same company as a source for different plants we had been discussing. It’s a grower and retailer called Outside Pride, and their website is here.
Last post was about white flowers, specifically white flowers in my garden that bloom in spring. Might as well finish my thought and talk about the white flowers of summer and fall.
It’s a grey day, one of a long line of grey days, and I am feeling color deprived. So I thought: why not write about some favorite flowers by color? Readers of this blog know that my favorite colors in the garden are orange and blue. However, I’ve already written about orange and blue flowers. …
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