Plants

The most common mistake people make with a shady lawn isn’t neglect, it’s the seed bag. Every spring, someone overseeds a patchy area under a big oak with the same Kentucky bluegrass or perennial ryegrass mix that worked fine in the sunny part of the yard, and every year it thins out and dies back … Read more

A lot of overseeding advice out there gets one thing backward: seeding whatever’s convenient into whatever’s already growing, rather than checking if the two actually get along. Turf-type tall fescue is a good example of how this goes wrong. Plenty of lawn care companies recommend it as a general-purpose overseed for a thinning lawn, but … Read more

Most of the grasses that show up in American gardens today came from somewhere wet. Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, the Miscanthus species behind most ornamental grass plantings, all of them evolved in climates with reliable rainfall, and all of them need supplemental water to look their best anywhere drier than that. The genuinely drought-tolerant grasses … Read more

Texas is genuinely too big and too climatically varied for a single “best grass” answer to mean anything. The humid, shaded lawns of Houston and East Texas want a completely different grass than the arid, water-restricted yards of West Texas, and neither of those has much in common with the harsher winters of the Panhandle, … Read more

Rosemary is a decent way to track how each hardiness zone changes the conversation. In Zone 5, it’s basically off the table outdoors. In Zone 6, it might survive if you find a genuinely cold-hardy cultivar and tuck it against a south-facing wall for the reflected heat, and even then a bad winter can still … Read more

Zone 8 is the sweet spot most herb gardeners are quietly hoping for without realizing it. This is where the classic Mediterranean herb palette, rosemary, bay laurel, French lavender, actually gets to behave the way people picture it behaving: planted once, left alone, treated as permanent landscape rather than a seasonal project. There’s no cold-hardy … Read more

Zone 10 flips the entire herb-growing conversation on its head. Everywhere colder, the whole exercise is about which plants can survive winter. Here, winter barely exists, frosts are rare or nonexistent, and the real question becomes which herbs can survive summer, since the same heat and humidity that lets ginger and turmeric live in the … Read more

Zone 4 doesn’t leave much room for negotiation. Winters here can bottom out at negative 30 to negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and that kind of cold ends the conversation for a lot of herbs before it even starts. There’s no cold-hardy rosemary cultivar tucked against a wall that’s making it through that, no French tarragon … Read more

Zone 6 sits in an odd, in-between spot for herb gardening. Winters here dip to between negative 10 and 0 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to kill the Mediterranean herbs that thrive further south, but mild enough that a handful of borderline plants make it through most years if you give them the right spot. That … Read more

There’s a specific kind of relief that comes with gardening in Zone 9: you stop digging things up. Somewhere north of you, a gardener is hauling a rosemary shrub into the garage before the first hard freeze, or wrapping a bay laurel in burlap and praying it survives the winter in a pot by a … Read more