12 Underutilized Landscape Plants
Many gardeners, including me, love to have flower beds bursting with color all season long. As you might guess, there are thousands of annuals, perennials, and shrubs available to plant in your garden.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN HERE
ENQUIRING MINDS WANT TO PLANT!
Knowledge and resources about plants and planting are so vast they can be overwhelming. The best approach is to take advantage of information based on your areas of interest and then seek the guidance of a plant professional. Your local nursery or garden center has inspired people ready to offer advice.
LEARN, ASK, PLANT!
The Best Flowering Trees for Small Spaces
Each spring, we look forward to the sight of trees loaded with delicate blossoms. There’s a reason people travel from all over the world for cherry blossom, or sakura, season in Japan.
Selecting Plants for a Pollinator Garden
Butterflies, birds, bees, bats, and beetles are pollinators. They transfer pollen to fertilize plants.
How Fruiting Plants and Birds Support Each Other
Native plants produce the right fruit at the right time to nurture the native bird population. In turn, the birds eat the fruit and distribute the seeds, helping to ensure the plant’s survival.
Boxwood Looking Battered?
Based on the mind-blowing number of boxwood samples that arrive daily at our Wilmette store and are being seen by our landscape team, there’s a big, post-winter problem. The damage is largely attributable to two things- an insect (Boxwood leafminer) and record-breaking low winter temperatures.
Don’t grow distant from your garden!
Free time on your hands? Avoiding social spaces, but need some time outside? Consider a few gardening tasks that can be accomplished in the next couple of weeks!
Caring for your Spring Bulbs
Fertilize your spring flowering bulbs with a slower-releasing granular of one to two pounds of 10-10-10 per 100 square feet when shoots first appear in spring and ideally four to six weeks before bloom.
Let Hydrangeas Be Your Garden Showpiece
A flowering Hydrangea is an eye catcher by itself. When you have an entire shrub blooming, it is a sight to behold with its gorgeous hues of blue, lavender, pink, red and white.
Weed Now, or Forever Hold Your Peace
Mammoth dandelions, carpets of Creeping Charlie and a smattering of lambsquarters, purslane and foxtail are flourishing while we stay in our homes during the rainy spring. Weeds can be a conundrum for most gardeners and may even cause some to throw in the trowel.
Not All Trees Are Good Trees
In the world of landscaping, trees are the backbones of the landscape. They are permanent structures that have stately features, shade our homes, provide spring floral displays, and some amazing fall color. There are, however, some trees that just behave badly.
