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How to Water Roses
Just like people, roses need water to be healthy and bloom beautifully. No water? No rose bush. You just end up with a dried-up dead stick poking through parched soil. Roses need more water more often [more…]
Choosing Fragrant Rose Varieties for Your Garden
Because fragrance is a great selling point, mail-order rose catalog descriptions never keep fragrant rose varieties a secret. To further narrow your choices, you can always look for those that have been [more…]
Choosing Hybrid Tea Roses for Your Garden
You can choose among hundreds of hybrid tea roses. You can go for color, fragrance, cut flowers, thornless (look for “smooth” in the name), or even a wacky name. Most people choose by color so here are [more…]
Choosing and Caring for Grandiflora Roses
As a class, grandiflora roses bear large, long-stemmed, hybrid tea-like flowers, either in clusters or one to a stem. Generally, grandiflora plants are tall, hardy, and vigorous, but plant habits can vary [more…]
Choosing Polyantha and Floribunda Roses
Polyanthas and floribundas are the workhorses of the rose garden. Of all the different kinds of roses, Polyanthas and floribundas are the most prolific bloomers, plus they’re useful in the landscape, in [more…]
How to Care for Miniature Roses
Miniature roses are perfectly scaled, smaller versions of larger roses, with all the colors, forms, substance, and often, fragrance of full-sized roses. Like other types of roses, each variety of miniature [more…]
Choosing Climbing Roses for Your Garden
Climbing roses take some effort to maintain, because you have to tie them up — but their special beauty is your reward. Climbing roses represent a diverse group of plants, producing long, supple canes [more…]
Using Shrub Roses in Your Landscape
Shrub roses are a diverse group of plants that don’t neatly fit into any of the other rose categories. Shrubs, especially the modern ones, are popular because of their long season of bloom, pest and disease [more…]
Choosing Antique Roses for Your Garden
Species roses and old garden roses — both sometimes referred to as antique roses — are the roses that preceded modern varieties. These roses are an incredibly diverse group of plants, with great variety [more…]
How to Store Bareroot Roses before Planting
You’ll probably have to store bareroot roses for some time before you can plant them, particularly if you purchase them through the mail. The key is to keep the plants cool so that they don’t start growing [more…]
Month-by-Month: Chores for Desert Gardeners at Extreme Altitudes
The Southwest deserts encompass mild-winter climates of the low-elevation deserts of Arizona and California. (The mountains of Arizona and New Mexico, as well as west Texas, have a more typical cold-winter [more…]
Month-by-Month: Chores for Gardeners in the Pacific Northwest
Pacific Northwest, including the milder parts of British Columbia, has a long season from spring through fall. West of the Cascade Range, the lingering cool spring tends to favor cool-season annuals, and [more…]
How to Fertilize Your Roses
To keep roses blooming again and again, you should fertilize them about every four to six weeks, although the type of fertilizer you use may alter this rule a bit. Always follow label instructions when [more…]
Garden Perennials that Love Shade
Some garden perennials absolutely insist on shade. Others perennial plants don’t mind direct sunlight in varying degrees, depending on your climate and light intensity. You can plant many of them in full [more…]
How to Identify Perennials You Can’t Divide
Gardeners know that producing more plants is the main reason to divide your perennials, but not all perennials can be divided. Division works best on perennials that grow into colonies — groups where each [more…]
How and When to Water Your Perennials
Most perennials require water only after the top few inches of soil dry out, but before the plant starts to show symptoms of drought stress. Perennials from arid habitats benefit when the dry interval [more…]
Diagnosing Perennial Plant Diseases
You may be surprised to find out that perennials can get sick by their own versions of the same organisms that attack people — fungi, bacteria, viruses, and microplasma. Plant diseases are primarily water-borne [more…]
Choosing the Right Annuals for Your Garden
To grow annuals, you don’t need to worry about your precise climate zone and temperature extremes as much as you do with permanent plants, such as perennials, trees, and shrubs. The first thing you need [more…]
Month-By-Month: Chores for Northern Gardeners
Gardeners in northern regions deal with warm summers and cold winters. But there is work to do in your garden through most of the year. Here is a month-by-month guide that keeps you in the gardening frame [more…]
Month-by-Month: Chores for Southern Gardeners
This garden calendar’s timing aims for the middle south in the middle of each month. For the lower south, the tasks will fall toward the beginning of the month. For the upper south, wait until month’s [more…]
Month-by-Month: Chores for California Gardeners
Gardeners in Southern California encounter some have the longest growing season in the United States. The gardening calendar offered here works for the majority of California, with two notable exceptions [more…]
Perennials that Grow in Sunny Spots
Perennials that are considered to need “full sun” require an average of five to six hours of sun a day, although most will settle for less sunlight without making too much of a fuss. Here’s a list of common [more…]
How to Grow Perennials from Cuttings
Growing perennials from cuttings involves creating a new plant from a stem that starts out with no roots at all. If you’ve ever stuck a stem of ivy in a glass of water and watched it grow roots, you already [more…]
How to Grow Perennials from Seed
Growing perennials from seed gives you the chance to start literally hundreds of plants from one package of seeds. Most perennial seeds don’t germinate very successfully when planted outside. By starting [more…]
How to Take Care of a Perennial Garden
Caring for established perennial is pretty simple. A 100- to 200-square-foot (9- to 18-square-meter) flower garden shouldn’t take more than a few minutes a week of tending, with a couple of hours of major [more…]
