Plants

Sandy soil has a reputation as difficult ground, but it’s really just difficult in a completely different way than clay. Water and air move through sand almost too freely, which means a sandy lawn drains fast enough that it rarely stays soggy, never really compacts under foot traffic, and almost never suffocates roots the way … Read more

Clay soil gets blamed for a lot of lawn failures that are actually caused by compaction rather than the clay itself. Clay particles are simply smaller and pack together more tightly than sand or loam, which means clay soil drains slowly, cracks when it dries out, and turns into something close to concrete under repeated … Read more

Blooming in winter is a genuinely strange evolutionary bet. Most flowering plants time their blooms to coincide with peak insect activity, but a shrub that flowers in January is doing the opposite, opening its petals during exactly the months when almost no pollinators are around to visit them. The plants that pull this off tend … Read more

Types of currants fall into a few color groups, red, white, pink and black, along with a number of wild species that are seldom seen in gardens. Currants are small, round berries borne in hanging clusters on thornless shrubs, which is the easiest way to tell them from their close relatives, the gooseberries. More than … Read more

Butterflies want something genuinely different from a flower than either bees or hummingbirds do. A hummingbird hovers and probes a narrow tube with its bill, and a bee crawls into a flower’s interior chasing pollen, but a butterfly needs somewhere to actually land, which is exactly why flat-topped or clustered composite flowers, the coneflowers, zinnias, … Read more

Hummingbirds and bees are drawn to almost opposite sets of traits, which turns out to be a genuinely useful fact for anyone designing a yard around one or the other. A hummingbird sees red vividly, has essentially no sense of smell to speak of, and carries a long, thin bill and tongue built specifically for … Read more

Most classic flowering shrubs, lilac, forsythia, azalea, spirea in its older forms, put on one genuinely spectacular show and then go quiet for the rest of the year. That single-flush pattern is simply how they evolved, timing a burst of energy into one concentrated spring bloom rather than spreading it out. A shrub that blooms … Read more

No flower is completely bee-proof, and it’s worth saying that honestly before recommending a single one. Bees are opportunistic foragers, and a hungry bee will occasionally investigate almost anything blooming nearby. What actually varies is how attractive a flower is relative to its neighbors, and a handful of genuine, well-documented traits reliably push a flower … Read more

Evergreen shrubs do most of the structural work in a landscape, holding a garden’s shape and color through the exact months when everything deciduous has gone bare. That year-round presence makes the category genuinely broad, spanning needled conifers built for cold climates, broadleaf evergreens suited to milder, wetter regions, and a handful of desert and … Read more

Low maintenance means something genuinely different from drought tolerant, even though the 2 categories overlap more than people expect. A low-maintenance shrub is one that doesn’t need constant pruning to hold its shape, doesn’t attract the pests and diseases that turn into a season-long spraying project, and doesn’t drop messy fruit or require the kind … Read more