Horticulture

Lately my teenage daughter and I have taken to sharing music with each other. We make playlists of songs we like and think that the other might enjoy, too. Among the tunes she accurately guessed I would love is “Priscilla” by a band called Sea Wolf.

ABOUT 50 MILLION YEARS AGO, India was a large island off the Australian coast. In one of the great tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust, India sailed off northward at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year, crunching into the Asian land mass. It heaved

MY WORK as a horticultural therapist bifurcates into two distinct tasks at every facility or residential site that employs me. On the one hand, I develop and implement programming tailored to a specific population’s or individual’s needs. On the othe

THE CLIMATE-CHANGE EMERGENCY has been at the top of my mind throughout the 2023 growing season. This year I’ve been evacuated due to wildfires. I’ve dealt with flash flooding and record-breaking rainfalls, and I’ve tried to overcome months of soaring

RECENTLY I POSTED to my Growing Greener podcast an interview with gardener and insect-lover Brian Stewart, which I recorded back in November 2019. Brian is a professor of physics at Wesleyan University and a neighbor of mine. Once every couple of wee

JOHN GRIMSHAW is a British plantsman with wide interests across horticulture. He serves as Director of the Yorkshire Arboretum in North Yorkshire, England, and Editor-in-Chief of the International Dendrology Society’s Trees and Shrubs Online, a web-b

Few flowers are as iconic as the Phalaenopsis orchid. Also known as the moth orchid, this plant with its rounded petals and tall, arching flower spikes is no stranger to controversy—it is considered by many to be a challenge to grow. How many times h

Most garden centers typically carry one size of any given perennial. So why spend time thinking about perennial sizes if your choices are limited? Because learning about them can help you plan better and plant smarter, and changes in the industry’s s

Have you ever looked at a garden and it seemed to get lost to its backdrop? Without visual guides created by an overarching structure, the eye doesn’t know where to rest, or where to register the end of a garden. When this happens, the garden becomes

Sometimes we all want that one curiosity in the garden to get people talking. That unique plant that’s a little… weird. A little…out of this world. But who needs an intergalactic trip when there are many unusual plants native to the United States, an

Sometimes gardeners shy from using plants with a propensity to seed themselves around the garden, for fear that these self-seeders will outcompete neighboring plants or upset the overall planting design. These are valid concerns, but gardening with s

TRAITS THAT GARDENERS value in roses are the hallmark of the American Garden Rose Selections testing program: beauty, fragrance, disease resistance and ease of maintenance. Award candidates are tested for two years in six different geographical regio

GARDENERS, ALL OF US, have many things in common, but the most widespread is the need to explain why the garden isn’t perfect every time some visitor steps foot in it. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But sometimes I’m caught off guard: Someone unexp