When designing your garden, it’s important to consider elements like color, texture and shape, but don’t forget fragrance too. The sweet perfume of fragrant plants will enhance the way you experience your garden by engaging more of your senses, evoking memories tied to certain scents, and causing you to interact with your flowers more closely.
It’s late August in Michigan and as I am sitting here looking out my window into my garden, I’m seeing an incredible number of bees whizzing by while a beautiful yellow Eastern swallowtail butterfly hangs upside down to feed on my six-foot tall ‘Uchida’ lilies. I am blessed to welcome so many pollinators into my
Perennial Plant of The Year- Asclepias tuberosa, what a great choice! With all the hype these days over the Monarch Butterfly this orange Milkweed is a perfect selection to be named Perennial Plant of the Year 2017.
This time of year, everyone is itching for spring to arrive so we can head on out and play in our gardens once again. While you’re waiting for the snow to melt, here are five things you can do from inside your warm house to prepare for the new season.
If one of your goals is to garden more sustainably, consider incorporating a DIY rain garden into your landscape. These gardens can look a lot like a perennial garden to help them blend in well with your other garden beds, but they serve a unique ecological purpose. The primary function of a rain garden is
From the time we are little children, we are fascinated with pollinators—the bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other small creatures that 85% of the world’s flowering plants need to reproduce and produce seeds or fruit. They really are an essential part of a healthy environment. Did you know that one out of every three bites of
I think there is two things that all gardeners have in common, the love for plants and the love of the butterfly. There is nothing more beautiful than the graceful flutter of butterflies frolicking from one flower to another. Add more color to your garden with the beauty of the butterfly.
Are you saying “I have this beautiful garden full of colorful blooms but have not seen that many butterflies all season!” The problem might be that you do not have the right plants for a butterfly garden. Although it is not difficult to attract butterflies with plants, there are a few elements that you need. You will want flowers that will attract the butterfly through all stages in its life. You will need a place for it to lay its eggs, plants that the large can eat off, places for the caterpillars to spin their chrysalides and once the chrysalides hatch, flower sources for the butterflies to get nectar.
If you enjoyed some blueberries in your cereal this morning or a thick slice of tomato on your BLT sandwich, you have a bee to thank. Native bees, of which there are approximately 4,000 species in North America, are the primary pollinator of many of our agricultural crops. They are generally far more efficient at
If you are like many people across the country this year, your area may be experiencing drought. While extreme drought tends to end the gardening season due to severe watering restrictions, it’s possible to keep your garden going in areas that are experiencing mild drought by growing plants that can adapt to drier soils. Below
