Lately I have been seeing a lot of unique and unusual plants on social media. The problem is, however, that they are FAKE. In recent years, the rise of AI-generated images has introduced a new challenge: Garden Center customers are bringing in…
This photo was taken on May 15, 2024, in Middleton, Wisconsin about a block from my home. This beautiful flowering perennial with bold foliage is generally grown for food rather than beauty–it’s rhubarb.
Sometimes sitting down with your grandchild to watch a special show that they say is just great, ends up being just that.
Leaf fossil?? No… I was walking in the woods in southeastern Wisconsin last week, and was passing a downed tree, and noticed this shelf or bracket fungus growing on the trunk, with leaf imprints. I guess the leaves must…
You might think this is one of the little people that inhabit Stephanie’s “Fairy Gardens,” but no, it’s me, peeking out from behind a very large Bird’s Nest Fern. Bird’s Nest Fern, Asplenium nidus, is commonly sold in the USA as a tropical…
Last week, while sitting outside with my husband, I saw bluebirds flying every which way. For weeks now, they have been staking out their nest boxes and fighting off the House Sparrows, or as some call them, English Sparrows. Either way, those sparrows are pretty mean.
In the spring of 2000 I planted a purple-leaf European Birch in my Bethesda back yard, within an existing stand of mature native oaks, tulip poplars and pignut hickory. This was not a wise choice as it would ultimately become…
Over a thousand years ago, Native Americans built effigy mounds, and many of these are located in Wisconsin. These “Indian Mounds” as we called them when I was growing up here were large earthen mounds in the shapes of animals…
Stephanie crossed off another item on her bucket list this Spring.
This is a photo of my brother-in-law David’s lawn, that I took on April 18th. “Lawn” is perhaps an overstatement. Maybe “Patch of Dirt Formerly Known as Lawn.” The lawn in question resides in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on sandy soil…
Piling mulch up against the trunk of a tree is known as volcano mulching. You see this all over, and it’s a bad practice. Over-mulching encourages the tree to send out roots under the mulch instead of in the ground, and…
Many of you have shared photos of your gardens with me over the past few years, and I have enjoyed each one so much! Keep them coming! Last week, Edna Poe shared this photo of her beautiful great-granddaughter Dior,…