Unlike the other plants in my garden, turf grass has always struggled to get my attention. Compared to my knowledge of food crops and herbaceous perennials, I know next to nothing about turf grasses…and I would prefer to keep it that way. Some would find that hard to believe, but it’s true....

I admire the knowledge of plant biologists, especially that group of expert botanists who make me feel like a novice in comparison…those are the people I love to hang around with at any given opportunity to improve my own skills and knowledge. Every time I look up a plant description, a little...

When you collect plants, it is rather useful to label and record everything added to the garden. I wish I had started sooner. I did not do this the first few years of starting my current garden, so many of my oldest plants are unknown down to cultivar and remain unlabeled. After a few years, I...

Watching how plants grow is just fascinating. Like when a terminal bud begins growing in the spring after being dormant, it leaves behind a bud scale scar that encircles the entire twig or branch and is visible to the naked eye. Since each twig makes only one terminal bud per year, you can use...

How perfect for Punxsutawney Phil to predict six more weeks of winter on the day when snow was falling heavily in the St Louis Metropolitan. School would have been cancelled when and where I grew up in Indiana on a day like that. But because of COVID-19, snow days for students are coming to be a...

What comes to mind when you think of your garden or the landscape in the fall? Not including all the work gardeners do in preparation for the coming winter, sit back and just meditate on all the things you associate with fall. My list was amazingly long and looking at it as a whole, it brought a...

It’s that time of year when eastern white pines (Pinus strobus) start dropping older needles, resulting in a new layer of sound-cancelling padding under trees. The sight of so many browning needles can be alarming though if you are not wise to the true meaning of evergreen. In general,...

Hard to believe it’s just four weeks out from the St Louis area’s first median frost date (~October 10), so prepping outdoor perennial container plants for over-wintering has moved higher up on my priority to-do list.  Some are hardy perennials that I just planted in large containers with the...

I really can’t say enough bad things about mulberryweed, a.k.a. hairy crabweed (Fatoua villosa). For me, it has been a weed nightmare that come in on a load of mulch about 10 years ago, and every year since has been a battle to control because I didn’t recognize it for what it was and take...

Not all the garden plants in my jungle are polite. Skullcap (Scutellaria spp.), Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum spp.), green dragon (Pinellia tripartite), bell flowers (Campanula spp.), field scabiosa (Knautia arvensis), salvia (Salvia spp.),...

When you have a lot of any one thing, it’s sometimes hard to choose a single favorite, but in the case of tall bearded iris, ‘Edenite’ is the one I most look forward to every season.  Described as sooty red-black with brown beards, this historical 1958 release is still a crowd pleaser. ...