Native plants feed the insects and birds that live near you. These guides cover what to plant, when to cut it back, and what to do when something won’t bloom.
If you planted native perennials and they spent the season producing a lot of leaves and almost no flowers, you’re probably frustrated. That’s reasonable. You bought plants described as blooming beautifully, put them in the ground, and watched them just……
Shady spots in a yard tend to get one of two treatments: the owner either gives up on them entirely, or fills them with hostas. Both approaches are understandable, and neither is a total disaster. But if you’ve got a…
For most of gardening history, the advice was simple: once a plant dies back in fall, cut it down, rake it up, and start fresh in spring. Tidy beds meant a job well done. That logic made a certain kind…
If you want hummingbirds in your yard, the instinct is to look up a list of plants, buy whatever’s available at the garden center, and call it done. That approach can work fine, but it skips over some things worth…
You planted milkweed for the monarchs. Then you went outside and found something else eating it — something fuzzy, or bright orange, or clustered in alarming numbers. Now you’re wondering whether to intervene. Here’s the short answer: most of the…
Black-eyed Susans have a reputation for being tough. They’re easy-to-grow, drought-tolerant, and full of color from midsummer into fall. So when one starts looking rough — wilting, yellowing, collapsing midseason — it tends to feel like you did something wrong.…
The phrase “blooms all summer” does a lot of heavy lifting in plant catalogs, and most of the time it’s doing it dishonestly. What’s usually meant is that a plant flowers for maybe six weeks in a good year with…
The honest answer is: usually none. And if that surprises you, you’re not alone — because most of us come to native plant gardening from a gardening culture that treats fertilizer as standard maintenance, something you just do in spring…
Coneflowers show up on almost every deer-resistant plant list, which gives people the impression they can plant them anywhere and walk away. That’s mostly true — and occasionally, in the wrong conditions, it very much isn’t. The short answer: deer…
If you have a balcony, a porch, or a paved backyard with no planting beds, this might be the most practical wildlife gardening advice you’ll read. The assumption that native plants need a yard to matter is wrong. Isis Howard,…
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