Garden Experiments
For the love of gardening and wildlife habitat
Bright, colorful flowers are a must for every garden. They can add color to container gardens, shade and full sun gardens, and mixed in with shrubs and trees. Find the perfect flowering plants for your garden's light, soil, moisture, and other conditions. Using a mixture of annuals and perennials helps keep your garden full of flowers throughout the seasons.
Right when the balloon flower, Platycodon grandiflorus, is about to bloom, it does its best impression of a balloon. It's so good at it, I have to work really hard to keep myself from trying to squeeze it and make it pop! In addition to having a really fun bud stage, this is a hard-working perennial. I love a plant you can put in the ground and …
Continue Reading about The Flower That Thinks It’s a Balloon
As I go about my daily routine each morning, I usually have a few minutes to check out my garden before I head to the office. One of my favorite spots in my yard is the 3 feet of ground surrounding my mailbox. The soil here is terrible and I didn't do anything to amend it, but I insisted on putting some plants here so that I wouldn't have to …
It's early April, but I've already started mowing the grass. The backyard just got a little too unruly, and I have already gotten my first tick of the season. This is always a sign that it's time to mow. I try never to walk through grass higher than my ankle for that reason. Now, I try to keep the front yard nice and well maintained, so the …
When I reach my limit with the bleakness of winter and cold temperatures, the tiniest pink striped flowers start to poke their heads out of lawns and ditches. To me, the Virginia spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) is a harbinger of spring and warmer weather. These wildflowers bloom just before the false garlic – so they fill up the lawns and …
Continue Reading about Virginia Spring Beauty – Claytonia virginica
Fall in the southeast still tends toward the warmer temps, which means that bees and butterflies are still hanging around. The scorching heat and sun of the late summer has often killed off many of the most prolific flowering plants, meaning there are less flowers for the pollinators to feed on. Adding a few fall-flowering plants can provide a …
Continue Reading about Fall Asters: Purple Blooms for Bees, Butterflies, & Beauty
I'm not cheap, I'm frugal. When it comes to my garden, that means I often repurpose plants from one planting or flower bed into another one. There's nothing wrong with that, right? In this case, I repurposed a croton from a container garden that had long outgrown its original pot and mixed it in with some heliconias that I purchased on sale with …
