Top Ten Lists Articles
Butterflies, hummingbirds, songbirds and bees add wonderful movement and great interest to our gardens. Attracting these winged friends to your garden is a fairly simple matter. Provide them with food, water and shelter and they are happy to come and stay awhile. There is a wide palette of plants that will work for both your garden and pollinators.
Supertunia petunias are some of the most versatile plants you can find. They are fantastic landscape varieties and look awesome when planted in a monochrome swath of color or when several colors are mixed. They also perform beautifully in patio planters, hanging baskets, window boxes, raised beds…actually, in any spot that gets at least four hours of sun a day. Six or more hours of sun a day helps maximize their flower power. If you live in a more northern climate, several hours of afternoon sun is the key to getting the best possible flower show.
At the end of each year, we always like to look back…before we look ahead. We like to see and learn from finding out what plants were the most popular with gardeners, and then we ask ourselves why? Was it varieties with bright colors, or plants that invite pollinators into the garden, or hydrangeas that offer blooms we can later bring indoors?
If you enjoy relaxing with a glass of wine and a good book at the end of the day, or sipping a good vino with friends and family, you may enjoy this list of plants that have wine-inspired names. Is it possible that a glass of wine (or two) inspired the names on this list? Let’s just say inspiration comes from many sources!
Enjoy this just-for-fun list of plants with spooky names…‘tis the season for ghouls and ghosts galore and orange and black décor too!
I get the feeling that orange is an often-overlooked color. Yellow and red, two other hot colors, seem to get better PR than orange, and that is unfortunate since orange is awesome! Whether you combine it with yellow and red to create a party atmosphere on your patio or contrast it with cool blue for a high drama planting, you’ll realize that orange is a much more flexible color than you might have thought. Here are 23 plants with orange flowers to consider for your garden.
I wish I could claim this idea as my own, but it is one I learned of a few years ago when I visited the University of Tennessee Gardens in Knoxville. They had several different gardens that would surely appeal to children, including a garden gnome village and a hobbit house to explore. However, the garden that caught my eye was the Plant Zoo. The plant zoo was planted with varieties whose names referenced animals of all kinds. Sometimes the names were specific plant names, like Tiger Lily, but others were common names like Lambs Ear. The tags in the garden used outlines of the animal in the plant name. I love the concept and I think this would be easy enough to pull off in your home garden with your kids or grandkids helping. Such an easy way to get a child interested in a garden! The plant tags the University had, might not be easily replicated. However, if you want to ID your plants, I think clip art, Sharpies, river rocks, and mod podge would allow the kids to make rock markers for your zoo garden in no time!
Summerific® Hibiscus are showstoppers in the landscape, especially when they are in bloom, but every headliner needs backup singers. Here are 10 plants that make great companions for these robust perennials.
Here at Proven Winners, we love vigorous plants - they so often go hand-in-hand with great garden performance. And great garden performance is our number one criteria when we select plants to add to our program, however, huge plants are not the answer in all situations. Sometimes a petite plant is exactly what you need! Here are eleven varieties that pack a wallop in a small package and deliver nonstop color all summer long.
Bees are essential pollinators and gardeners can help sustain native bee populations by planting flowers that bees can feed upon. These 20 yellow annuals, perennials, and shrubs are good plants to incorporate in your bee-friendly garden.
