I have taken many trips to many countries, but few fieldtrips I have taken have taught me more than joining Larry Vickerman and Mike Bone last summer on a foray through Kansas. Yes! Kansas!
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Think it’s too early to be doing necessary work out in your yard? Think again. The late winter and early spring is an excellent time to be training young trees via pruning. Shade and ornamental trees are an important component of the home landscape and need regular pruning when young to fulfill their purpose in the landscape. Home owners can perform essential pruning on their young trees that improves strength and attractiveness.
Although a licensed and certified arborist should be hired to work on large trees, a home owner working from the ground or on an appropriate pruning ladder can perform much of the early structural pruning work.
An important step before beginning structural pruning of a small tree is to gain some understanding of what its natural shape or form will be. Observing mature specimens of the species to be worked
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Perhaps the largest botanical newsbreak of the past week was the publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that several mature, fully functional individuals of Silene stenophylla (a member of the carnation family that still exists today) had been grown from fruits found
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Remind me not to take pictures of happy spring flowers in February:
Crocus and Agave
So far, each time I’ve captured those early blooms, the skies turn around and dump snow all over them the very next day!
None-the-less, they are out there; this snow, too, will melt; and in a day or so, you will be delighted again by their cheerful, tough little countenances!
A few pictures to lead you toward March:
Helleborus foetidus blooming last weekend in Munchenstein, Switzerland
Winter is a great time to notice details about plants. For one thing, fewer plants are around, so you can afford to spend some time taking a closer look at those that are. Now that plants are peeking through the snow again (but while the white backdrop still persists here and there) its easy to notice some fairly striking color differences in the leaves that still persist.
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Saving seed has become more t
han a passion – it’s pure joy. I think differently now about planning my garden and ordering seeds. When Cord and I got back from Seed School with Bill McDorman, we came home to a fall garden, dripping with seed, ready to be saved. Armed with a beginner’s knowledge, we gathered more seed that fall than I could have ever believed. The garden was so abundant and we had been so wasteful for so many years. We just let it fall!
You can bet the following spring – we were ready. We planted saved carrot roots in March for seed production in fall. It was the most beautiful thing to see hundreds of carrot flowers covered in
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