You might not want to listen to me today. I'm about to suggest that you give your Valentine something other than a dozen roses. It might get you in trouble.
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Connecticut may not be the first place that comes to mind when the topic is tropical fruit — unless you know about Logee's Tropical Plants.
You may not be thinking much about spring, but you should.
Madagascar. The name rolls around in your mouth with a lyrical exoticism.
Growing up in Maryland, there were two things that could be counted on as indisputable evidence that spring would soon arrive. The first was the return of robins, a bird that doesn't seem to bother to migrate from our area. The second was the flowering of Japanese or flowering quince, Chaenomeles speciosa. It was usually about March or the beginning of April when these rosy-pink flowers started to unfurl, the first suggestion of color in the landscape.
Gardening events for 2012 start out with a bang when Slow Food Piedmont and Old Salem Museums and Gardens combine for a community seed swap on Jan. 14.
The garden is sleepy and cold, and as the year ends, it's time for quiet reflection and celebration. In the garden, we can seek both.
If you're riding down Country Club or Reynolda roads, and you are suddenly taken with the urge to kiss your driver, blame it on the mistletoe overhead. The celebrated, pucker-inspiring holiday plant is thriving in the canopy overhanging these roads.
The movement toward growing your own food continues to gather momentum. This is reflected in this year's selection of gardening books.
Even seasoned gardeners fall under the spell of orchids.
At first glance, one might mistake Ben Sunderman's farm for some sort of training grounds for acrobats. Twenty-foot utility poles are buried 4 feet in the ground and crossed by wires. Strings plummet from these to the ground. But closer inspection reveals that this apparatus supports a vine known as hops.
Soon the winter will put this garden to bed, but for now it has ignored the little bit of cold weather in November. It has been a wonderful fall, and I have been thankful for every minute of it. Gardeners, for the most part, are a gracious bunch.
Lately, my garden has resembled LaGuardia Airport at rush hour. There has been about as much bee traffic as there has been air space to handle them. A constant hum has filled the air as the bees search for nectar.
Betty Davis believes in celebrating holidays and seasons.
Fall is an excellent time for a garden makeover. Whether you are adding to an existing border or bed, or starting a new planting plan, autumn supplies what is needed to get plants off to a good start.
This is the time to plant bulbs. If you are sifting through the catalogs, don't overlook the little guys. Crocuses, snowdrops, dwarf irises and others are only a few inches tall, but arriving at the end of winter, they can make a big impact. Many of these appear before the tulips and daffodils think about showing their colors, and they are all the more treasured for it.
A rain garden is a deceptively simple-looking element. A swale backed by a berm, a rain garden may appear as an island of plants or look like a pond in the process of going back to dry land.
The partnership between the Betty and Jim Holmes Food Bank Garden and the Second Harvest Food Bank has been working for 13 years.
The conference "Restoring Southern Landscapes and Gardens" will return to Winston-Salem for the 18th time, Sept. 22-24.
"Impatient" and "gardener" are not two words that fit together well. Still, there are those of us who want to sow seeds and have results three days later.
It's that time of year in the garden when summer's heat and exuberance mingle with a tang of decline. Plants are laden with a burden of fruit, and the humid air is heavy with the work of bees and aggravating mosquitoes.
The term guerilla gardening comes from the 1970s. Citizens took derelict land in New York into their own hands and started to create gardens.
Though summer seems to drag on interminably, gardeners know that August marks a transitional period.
Botanists like to bust plants up into convenient groups for classification purposes. One of those groups is the malvaceae, or mallow family. It is a group of ornamental and economic importance.
You can add one more pest to the ever-expanding list of insults to our native trees and forests.
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