May 10 2025
Growing echinacea from seed takes more patience than bringing home a nursery-grown plant, but it is an inexpensive way to fill a sunny garden with these long-blooming North American perennials. Once established, coneflowers can return year after year, attracting bees and butterflies while their dried seed heads provide food for birds later in the season. …
May 06 2025
When much of the summer garden begins to fade, asters are just getting started. Their daisy-like flowers arrive in shades of purple, blue, pink, lavender, and white, often covering plants with color from late summer well into fall. That late bloom time makes asters particularly valuable in a perennial garden. They bridge the gap between …
May 02 2025
May is one of the busiest—and most rewarding—months in the garden. Spring flowers are in full swing, vegetable beds are filling up, perennial growth seems to change overnight, and warm-season plants are finally ready to move outside in many parts of the country. But May does not mean the same thing everywhere. Gardeners in colder …
Apr 29 2025
A hummingbird can transform an ordinary moment in the garden. One second the flowers are still, and the next a tiny bird appears almost out of nowhere, hovering beside a bloom before darting away at astonishing speed. If you would like those visits to become more frequent, putting out a feeder is only part of …
Apr 27 2025
Few flowers give you as much color for as little effort as cosmos. Their daisy-like blooms seem to float above airy, fernlike foliage, creating a relaxed cottage-garden look from summer into fall. Bees and butterflies visit the flowers, cut stems make beautiful bouquets, and the plants can bloom for months with surprisingly little attention. Cosmos …
Apr 24 2025
Few wildflowers make an entrance quite like lupines. Their tall flower spikes rise above meadows, roadsides, mountain slopes, and garden borders in shades of blue, violet, pink, yellow, white, and combinations of several colors. A large stand of lupines can transform an ordinary landscape into something theatrical almost overnight. It is easy to understand why …
Apr 19 2025
Few garden projects look more effortless than a meadow filled with wildflowers. Coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, asters, blazing star, and dozens of smaller blooms seem to mingle naturally while bees, butterflies, and other insects move from flower to flower. Creating that meadow, however, usually takes more preparation than scattering a packet of seeds over the …
Apr 18 2025
Growing lupines from seed can feel a little mysterious the first time you try it. The seeds are large and easy to handle, yet they sometimes sit stubbornly in the soil while other flowers germinate around them. The reason is often the seed coat. Many lupines produce hard-coated seeds that resist water penetration. In nature, …
Apr 05 2025
Topsoil sounds simple enough: it is the upper layer of soil where much of a plant’s root activity takes place. But when you see bags labeled “topsoil” at a garden center, the term can become surprisingly confusing. Is topsoil the same thing as garden soil? Should you add it to an established flower bed? Can …
Mar 17 2025
A beautiful spring garden does not happen by accident. The strongest designs usually combine good timing, thoughtful plant placement, healthy soil, and enough variety to keep the garden interesting as the season changes. Instead of filling a bed with whatever happens to be blooming at the garden center, it helps to think about the whole …
