Gardening Tips

Winter is a time for creating the perfect garden on paper and in your imagination, whether it is a vegetable garden or a flower garden, or better yet, a vegetable garden with flowers planted in and around the vegetables to welcome the pollinators. Most annuals need to...

There are some surprises in the gardens during this chilly time of the year, and one is the emergence of a very hardy and rather small plant, the Crocus tommasinianus or the snow crocus. Every January in my yard a small clump of snow crocus blooms, starting out by...

The winter holidays are often filled with baking, both sweet and savory dishes that fills the home with delicious fragrances. Winter also has special plants that reflect the spirit of the holidays, but there is always room to add other plants that will share the...

Fall is a wonderful time to remember what thrived in the garden and what didn’t. It is also a great time to see what bloomed during the summer that should be left alone, not trimmed back, so that the native song birds can feast on the flower seeds. There are a lot of...

Summer is often considered after Labor Day, but no one told the Seven-son flower tree that. This very late blooming deciduous tree is considered either a large shrub or a small tree, growing only 10-20 feet tall and 8-10 feet wide. The tree has dark green leaves that...

Monarda punctata, or “BeeBop,” is also known as dotted beebalm and will thrive on our Eastern Shore in sandy soils with moisture and full sun. Once established, dotted beebalm becomes more drought tolerant, but will always flower better and are less susceptible to...

Daylilies are delightful summer blooming herbaceous perennials that come in a rainbow of vibrant or soft colors, some double bloomers and some with long elegant petals. Their name says it all, the flowers open every morning and bloom all day long, closing in the...

One of the slowest of herbaceous perennials to emerge from the soil in spring is the Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) with its bright green foliage and its sunny orange flowers, but they are well worth waiting for! These native butterfly magnets love full sun and...

There are not many plants other than annuals that will flower from summer into frost, but there are a few wonderful herbaceous perennials that live for quite a while and will bloom from summer until the first hard frost. Agastache “Blue Fortune,” also called “giant...

Tree Peonies bloom two weeks before the herbaceous perennial peonies, and then there is a new hybrid peony called Bartzella Itoh Peony, which blooms along with the herbaceous perennial peonies. The blooms are large bright yellow many petal with red flush in the center...