Christmas fern will provide your garden with four seasons of deep, evergreen beauty. A deer-resistant native of the Eastern United States, this robust, easy fern is a terrific choice for erosion control on shady and partly-shaded slopes, and is easily divisible for gardeners with large areas to cover.
Butterfly weed is a milkweed plant that attracts butterflies to the garden with its clusters of bright orange-to-yellow blooms rich with nectar and pollen. This clump-forming perennial grows two feet tall from tuberous roots with glossy green, lance-shaped leaves.
You may not always be able to observe pollinators in your garden but they are constantly there, and are working to your advantage. Not only are pollinators, such as bees, wasps, flies, beetles, butterflies, moths, bats, and hummingbirds an important part of the natural environment, but they also benefit us by their services to plants.
The pure, tiny white flowers of Boneset eupatorium perfoliatum stand-out in the late summer landscape and have a pleasant, floral scent that wafts through the garden air. Bonset has been recognized by pollination ecologists as attracting large numbers of native bees and butterflies, as well as beneficial wasps and beetles. It has a long bloom time of July through September...
How A Heatwave Affects Garden Pests - While its been a trying time for us and our garden plants, the heat has been a blessing for many a garden pest. Each species of garden pest/insect has an ideal range of temperatures within which they complete their life cycles. All of them are essentially cold-blooded, which means they can’t produce their own body heat.
July can be full of a diverse range of colors, hues and textures and your garden beds can flourish with minimal maintenance if you just use native plant species. Here’s six (6) varieties of native perennials that bloom during July, many of them lasting into August.
A water-efficient landscape has functional lawn areas that are irrigated properly and plants grouped and irrigated according to their water needs. Plants native to our region can help with landscape water conservation because they are adapted to our climatic growing area, and they can be watered less frequently than landscape plants native to other growing zones.