AMERICAN GARDENER

Plants with white variegation get their striking two-tone or patterned leaves from a genuinely interesting biological quirk rather than any deliberate dye or treatment. According to the University of Illinois Extension, variegated leaves are frequently the result of a chimera, a plant made up of 2 or more genetically distinct cell layers, where the white … Read more

Deciduous trees are woody plants that shed all their leaves at the end of the growing season, a strategy that lets them shut down water loss and conserve energy through a cold or dry period rather than trying to keep leaves alive through conditions they can’t support. That single trait separates them from evergreen conifers … Read more

Plants with red seed pods rely on that vivid color for the same basic reason so many red fruits exist in nature: birds and other animals see red exceptionally well, and a bright red seed advertises itself as a reward worth eating and carrying elsewhere. That strategy backfires spectacularly in a genuine minority of cases, … Read more

Controlling weeds in your garden or lawn works best as a combination of strategies rather than relying on any single method, since most weeds have evolved several different ways to survive a single tactic. A weed with a deep taproot shrugs off shallow tilling, a weed with a massive seed bank shrugs off a single … Read more

Creepy trees that appear to devour objects, structures, and even other trees aren’t performing any kind of deliberate predation, but the visual effect can be genuinely unsettling once you understand the biology behind it. A tree trunk grows almost entirely in diameter through a thin layer of cells called the cambium, and anything left in … Read more

Trees that grow eerie or weird shapes tend to earn that reputation through some combination of extreme age, a genuinely strange evolutionary strategy, or growing in conditions so harsh that survival itself twists the tree into something unrecognizable. A handful owe their unsettling reputation to real, well-documented danger rather than just appearance, while others have … Read more

The best weeds for animal feed often turn out to be the same plants a gardener spends the summer pulling, since many common lawn and pasture weeds carry protein, mineral, and vitamin levels that rival or exceed cultivated forage crops. That overlap between “weed” and “valuable forage” isn’t a coincidence, since the same aggressive growth … Read more

Edible woodland plants in the UK range from ancient-woodland indicator species that have grown in the same patches of ground for centuries to common hedgerow opportunists that have spread into almost every wood on the island. As with foraging anywhere, positive identification always comes first, since several genuinely dangerous plants, including cuckoo pint and deadly … Read more

Types of strawberries span a genuinely enormous range once you look past the handful of varieties sold at a typical grocery store, covering everything from tiny, intensely aromatic wild species to enormous, firm-fleshed commercial hybrids bred specifically to survive a cross-country truck shipment. Nearly every cultivated strawberry sold today descends from a single 18th-century cross … Read more