Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you
More than once in the past couple months I’ve come close to pulling the plug on FaceBook. What started as a fun and easy way to keep up with family and friends back home and stalk old girlfriends has devolved into an infinite do-loop of whininess, acrimony and vitriol over GMO’s, organic food, vaccines, and President Obama. … Continue reading this article “Stuck in the middle with you”
Like some television commercials say about their product, “But wait, there’s more”, this statement can also be said about flowering shrubs. Just because spring is over, it does not mean there is no more color in the garden. Yes, there are herbaceous perennials that bloom in summer, but there are some fabulous flowering shrubs that also shine during the dog days of summer besides roses and Japanese spirea. Here are three of my favorite larger shrubs with big landscape impact.… Continue reading this article “There is a Cure for the Summertime Blues”
Regular fishing, for actual fish, is quite possibly the second most boring think ever invented (First place, of course, goes without question to baseball) but sport fishing! Now THAT is something I can get behind.
By sport fishing I mean, of course, looking for sports – chance mutations – in plants. Sometimes a flower color changes, or sometimes a leaf becomes variegated, like on this lilac branch I found at a friend’s nursery a couple years ago
Nurseries are great places to go “fishing” for these sports, simply by walking down the rows of plants looking for anything odd or out of place.… Continue reading this article “Go sport fishing at your local nursery”
– Holly Scoggins
Here’s a couple of clematis (clemati?) you may not be familiar with. Both are easy to grow but differ from the more common large-flowered form. There is a great deal of hybridization within the genus, so many cultivars are placed within “groups” rather than described as a cultivar of the species.
Clematis ‘Princess Diane’
Texensis Group
Clematis ‘Princess Diana’ in the author’s garden.
Crossing a large-flower clematis cultivar with Clematis texensis (scarlet leather flower) resulted in this lily-shaped beauty.… Continue reading this article “Uncommon Clematis”
This month, the Garden Professors have moved to a new website. You can still easily find us at gardenprofessors.com (bookmark that address!), but we’re no longer actively posting on the eXtension website. This change was necessitated by eXtension’s decision to restrict leadership to faculty belonging to premium universities (those paying a sizable annual membership fee). Since neither Dr. Gillman nor Dr. Chalker-Scott belongs to a premium university, and since both are founding members of the Garden Professors, we made a group decision to host our blog independently.… Continue reading this article “Welcome to our new home!”