AMERICAN GARDENER

Those dead, straw-colored circles that show up in a dog owner’s lawn every spring aren’t caused by disease or poor mowing, they’re caused by nitrogen and, according to more recent research, lactic acid concentrated in a small, repeated urination spot. The damage has a distinctive look: a dead patch 3 to 6 inches across ringed … Read more

Athletic fields live under a genuinely different set of pressures than a single-sport stadium. A high school or municipal park complex often hosts soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, and football on the exact same rectangle of turf across a single season, and each sport wears the grass down in a different pattern. Soccer and lacrosse spread … Read more

A football field asks more of its grass than almost any other application, including golf courses and ordinary sports fields used for less punishing games. Cleats tear at the surface on nearly every play, the same 20-yard stretch between the hash marks takes the heaviest pounding of the entire field, and a stadium field needs … Read more

The Florida Panhandle plays by different rules than the rest of the state, and the difference comes down to something South Florida almost never has to think about: a real winter. While Miami and the Keys can go years without a frost, Panhandle towns like Pensacola and Tallahassee see genuine freezes most winters, occasionally hard … Read more

Full sun isn’t just the absence of shade, it’s a genuine requirement for most of the grasses people actually want in a lawn or garden. Turf breeders have spent decades chasing shade tolerance specifically because it’s the harder trait to build into a grass, and most species still default to needing 6 to 8 hours … Read more

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