How well do you know your flower bulb types? Do the words bulbs corms rhizomes tubers and bulbets seem like Greek to you? Read on and you find out what you need to know to be a bulb expert. Flowering bulbs are some of the easiest plants to grow. Some of the spring flowering bulbs,…
This fall gardening checklist will help you get ready for the gardening off-season. Learn about autumn garden care and how to winterize your outdoor space to make things so much easier when the garden starts blooming next spring. Getting out in the garden this time of the year is a great time to look back on…
It’s time for this week’s garden tour. I love July in my summer garden. It’s the time when everything is really blooming but it is not too hot, yet The color is amazing and there seems to be something new for me each day as I wander around my garden beds. Grab a cup of…
Balloon Flower, or Platycodon grandiflorus, is also known as Chinese Bell flower. The common names of this pretty perennial plant come from the plump found flower buds that resemble hot air balloons or Chinese lanterns before they open. Blue flowers are unusual in the garden. Keep reading to find out how to grow this flower with a…
These Composting Tips will take the mystery out of making compost for you. If you enjoy vegetable gardening or growing flowers, adding organic matter formed by composting will give you great results. Did you know that forgetting to compost is a common vegetable garden mistake? Have you always thought that making compost is difficult? The…
Mother Nature has the perfect answer for summer bugs- mosquito repelling plants! We can grow annuals, perennials, and herbs that will keep the bugs away naturally. With summer comes lots of outdoor living. Sadly, that can mean lots of mosquitoes. I don’t like to use chemical products so this natural solution is great for keeping…
Transplanting monkey grass is a simple process if you keep just a few things in mind. As far as growing perennials is concerned, it is one of my favorite easy care plants. Liriope is commonly known as monkey grass or spider grass. It is a versatile and easy to grow ground cover that tolerates heat well…
One of the joys of summertime is the flavor of homegrown strawberries. Growing strawberries is very easy as long as you understand the type of plant that you are trying to grow. Of all the fruit plants, strawberries are one of the easiest to grow and so rewarding. The taste of the berries makes for great…
The red hot poker is a showy and dramatic plant. If you love growing perennials that give color all summer long, this is the plant for you. Other names for this showy plant are torch lily and poker plant. The botanical name for this plant is kniphofia uvaria and there are more than 70 known…
These astilbe companion plants like the same moisture and light conditions and will make a beautifully coordinated garden bed. Astilbe is a gorgeous perennial that is right at home in a shady moist garden. You can grow it alone, but a well designed garden looks better with more than just one type of plant. Keep…
There are many chocolate colored flowers available, but Chocolate Cosmos gets a special boost. I give it this rating because, not only does it have a lovely dark chocolate fragrance, but it is also one of the top 10 rarest flowers in the world. The plant is a perennial and is easy to grow and…
Astilbe is one of my favorite perennials for a shade garden. There are not many plants that really like the shade that also flower beautifully, but Astilbe is one of them. Astilbe colors could even be called the stars of a shady garden. Astilbe makes a wonderful border edging plant for a large garden bed….
Biltmore Estate Gardens are a highlight of a visit to this iconic estate in Western North Carolina. The gardens, while not classified as a Botanical Gardens per se, is a fabulous place to see plants of all types. My husband and I recently spent several days in the mountains of North Carolina with our daughter….
I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite daylilies in a garden tour. When it comes to versatility, blossoms and easy of care, very few perennials can match daylilies. They give a magnificent show of flowers, and sometimes more than once during the summer season. They can be managed by…
We recently had visitors from the UK who are gardeners, so we took them to JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh for a visit. One of my favorite parts of the gardens is The White Garden. It is a wonderful place to spend a day. You can walk around and enjoy Easter lilies, white agapanthus and…
Follow some of these plant propagation tips and you will have a whole slew of new perennial garden plants without the outlay of cash at the garden center. If you garden, you will know that the cost of buying new plants can get very expensive over time. You don’t have to spend a lot of money…
My North Carolina winter garden is a sight to behold right now. Winter storm Jonas has been all in the news this week. It left a blanket of snow and ice from the South in the US right up the corridor to New England. Winter storm Jonas may break some records on the east coast!…
This year, we spent the summer on a garden make over. I thought it would be fun to share the tips that I learned during the process. It’s that time again. Time to transform one of my garden beds that just won’t seem to keep to a single design. I call it my “what will…
I’ve always considered strawberry begonia plants as an indoor plant, since that is the way that I have generally grown them. But I had a surprise this year when I discovered that the plant is a hardy perennial for me here in North Carolina. Growing Requirements for Strawberry Begonia Plants I purchased several small strawberry…
My local garden center does not often have plants that are too much out of the ordinary, so I was delighted to find this Mexican Hat coneflower right here for sale in Raleigh. This interesting variety of coneflower is also called the “Red Prairie Coneflower.” The perennial served as a dye source for Native Americans…
These tips for growing clematis will help you give this vining plant a home in your back yard. Last spring, I repurposed an old mailbox into a place for my garden tool storage. I planted a few different plants around the base, but I was never happy with the look of it. I decided I…
My family has long loved gardening. It all started with my great-grandmother (and I am sure her mother before this but I never knew her). She loved vegetable gardening, particularly yellow pole beans. The seeds from her pole beans have been passed down from generation to generation and are now growing in my garden. Since…
Growing herbs adds a ton of flavor to all your recipes, but keeping track of what is growing can be challenging. These wooden spoon herb plant markers are both functional and decorative. Herb Identification might seem easy but those tiny seedlings have a frustrating way of looking the same! I have a large group of herbs…
My husband used to buy me lilies all the time because he loved the look of them so much. I love them too, but not as cut flowers indoors (they have a stinky smell inside that I don’t like.) I never had the inclination to tell him that they were not my favorite cut flower…
It’s time for my front garden make over! This has been a year of garden make overs for me. I spent so much time last year dealing with my squirrel problem and tending my vegetable garden that I did not have a lot of time to deal with my flower garden beds. And I can…
Let’s test your garden smarts. I thought it would be fun to take a photo from my garden, and enlarge it to show only the bloom, and see if you can name it. A few hints: it does not mind if the soil is dry it flowers all spring and summer the flowers come in…