TREEMENDOUS CONIFERS It takes a Christmas tree farm an average of eight to twelve years to bring their crop to fruition. Most of these growers also harvest their product for transplanted sales. That is to say that they are selling live trees throughout the year to...
False Holly Is a True Winner One of the challenges of retail sales in a garden center is educating your customer’s understanding of sunlight, soil and moisture. Often the responses to these questions are ambiguous at best. “I get part sun, part of the day”...
A Heavenly Plant Imagine a plant’s versatility that it could offer itself as a specimen, useful for mass plantings, behave itself in a container garden, have year round interest and in all instances soften garden designs with its unique bamboo-like texture. With all this can you...
Autumnal Treats With the heat of summer behind us and shorter days and cooler nights ahead, it’s almost time for plant material to shut down and begin to go dormant. Cooler days and nights start to slow the growing and stretching of plant material and make...
Hazy, Hot and Purple Purple is one of those colors that just jump out at you in a landscape. Whether it’s the painted pansy faces we think of in spring or the beautiful purple leaf plum trees we see April through November, purple is an audacious...
A Deciduous Conifer For many the term deciduous conifer seems to be a misnomer. The thought of a tree losing its foliage yet still considered a conifer is improbable. Often I talk about selecting smaller plants for smaller garden footprints. There are times however, when a...
An Endless Summer Annuals such as impatiens, begonias and marigolds have always had bragging rights for repeat blooms throughout the summer. Perennials like hemerocallis (daylilies) have stretched the bounds of summer’s distant end providing drifts of colorful borders in the landscape in the heat of summer....
Bon Appetite--I Think Not! What won’t the deer eat? This is a question that I’m asked over and over again. My answer is unwavering. The more educated you are about deer resistant plants, the less of a selection the deer have. Plant materials that have thorns,...
Spring Fever Living in New Jersey we are privileged to experience the changing of seasons. We can experience them in their entirety, both the good and the bad. Winter can dish out some knockout storms, but it also sets a backdrop for some outstanding color. The...
From Doldrums To Delights Tulips, daffodils and forsythia have long been associated as being harbingers of spring. They are a welcome site after the doldrums of winter. However, these popular plant icons are not the only ones we have to look forward to. There are others...