A while back, I enjoyed a pre-spring theatre outing with my design colleague and dear friend, Marty Carson. Our jaunt allowed me to brain-pick her favorite summer flowering bulbs to plant in the spring. How fun to learn that one of her favorites is technically a corm.
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. Spring soon arrives, and many are anxious for green with a splash of color. My go-to is harvesting branches of forsythia, but you can also bring other spring-flowering woody plants indoors to encourage early spring blooms. How to Encourage Ear
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. It’s the time of year I attend manufacturer showcases premiering new products, mostly paver or block retaining wall systems made of concrete. Brine and road salt are not kind to concrete, though many paver manufacturers tout that theirs
Hello, fellow lover of all things green. While we don’t often see the nighttime chorus of insects from mid-to-late summer into fall, we indeed hear them, and some continue to sing by day, joining the daytime ruckus of the cicadas we spoke about last week. What a choir! They don&
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green, The routine of a family of Robins nesting in the Doublefile Viburnum outside the kitchen window did not happen this year. Let’s just say aggressive fall pruning done by someone who lives here inhibited the protection of the thick canopy
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. It was April Fool’s Day when I entered Willowwood Arboretum. The meadows had not yet emerged but were dancing with daffodils. I made my way to the parking lot, where Bruce Crawford, Morris County Park Commission’s Manager of Hortic
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. It’s mulch time, and John from Andover, NJ, asked what kind of mulch to use. First and foremost, stay clear of trunks and stems to prevent disease. That’s my polite way of saying no volcano mulch, please. To avoid mushrooms in the
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green, It’s spring madness mode for those of us in the horticultural industry and for home gardeners, busy planning and planting this year’s bounty. The same is true for critters such as the peepers I adore in the pond with their evening
Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. Have you ever considered Broadleaf Plantain, the flat-leaved weed with spikey seed heads that invades your lawn, a beneficial plant? It was news to me to learn that it’s a valuable herb, though I’ve known for years that Dandelions
Hello, fellow lover of all things green, It felt therapeutic to tend to the rejuvenation pruning of the Smokebush and other shrubs. Rejuvenation pruning involves drastically cutting back overgrown plants to restore them to their intended shape or to manage their size, which was the ca