LAOS – Off the beaten track
2 days ago
For gardeners with acreages & those who just wish they had a bigger canvas...
General Culture: Best grown in organically rich, medium wet, well-drained soils in full sun to part shade. Tolerant of a wide range of soils. Prefers consistently moist, well-drained soils. Suckers freely to form colonies unless root suckers are removed. Best winter stem color occurs on young stems. Although pruning is not required, many gardeners choose to cut back all plant stems to 1 foot in late winter each year to promote the best winter stem color. Another pruning option is to remove 20-25% of the oldest stems in early spring each year. Any loss of flowers through spring pruning is not terribly significant since the small flowers of this dogwood are rather ordinary.For more pictures and information on Midwinter Fire dogwood, visit the mbot.org site.
"Americans will spend thirty-four billion dollars this year on plants, gardening products and services, and a growing portion of the industry that sells them to us is convinced that we are a bunch of overworked, stressed-out, attention deficit-disordered fruit baskets who have no time, no desire, and no ability to learn how to garden.
This is the marketing monster behind the great dumbing down of gardening in America that began ten years ago, and gets worse and worse every breath I take. We are exposed to a multiplying plague of insipid plants, products, and procedures designed to convince consumers that gardening is easy, that it takes little time, and that you don't really need to learn all those fussy minor details such as soil preparation, planting procedure, pruning, propagation, pest control, watering, winter care, botanical Latin names of plants or, lord help you, design."
www.countrygardener.blogspot.com
This delightful, well-written blog from Yvonne Cunnington, a gardener in southern Ontario's USDA Zone 5, conveys her desire to work with nature, not against it, because "Nature tends to win anyway," she writes. Gorgeous photographs of her garden accompany each entry.