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Sustainability

In the best of times, keeping a summer garden fresh and appealing is a challenge. This year, with half of the lower forty-eight states experiencing unusual heat patterns and moderate to severe drought, the challenges are even greater.  There are, however, environmentally friendly ways to keep your garden blooming throughout the dog days of summer. 

One of the first places to begin implementing water-wise techniques is your lawn. Ironically, , watering your lawn is an important way to conserve water. An irrigation system, when designed and installed by well-trained, knowledgeable technicians, can save the client time, effort and money all the while protecting an extremely valuable natural resource. 

If the term RAIN GARDEN brings an image of a weedy bog teeming with scores of mosquitoes and other unpleasant flying insects to your mind, then it’s time to update and edit that picture! 

Welcome back to our virtual tour of some of the world’s outstanding --  and unusual  --  botanical gardens. For this trip, I thought we would start right here in the United States with a visit to a garden that is one of my personal favorites, the Desert Botanical Garden in  Phoenix, Arizona.

Here in the Midwest, with its frigid days and frequent snowstorms, the winter months are the perfect time to immerse yourself in nature. No, you can’t head to the garden to putter, but you can curl up with a good book  --  or a magazine  -- or a blog -- or even a stack of seed catalogs to expand your horizons, learn something new and get your nature fix. 

I’m always searching for something new to dig into and through the years, recommendations from friends and from professionals in the field have led me to some outstanding reads. This year I asked the staff at Embassy Landscape Group to share some of their wintertime favorites. 

Not surprisingly, they’ve suggested some great choices.

  By Sandra Nelson   Wasps, as a family, have gotten a bad rap over the years. They have been branded as destructive and aggressive, working together in mobs intent on harming every human within the reach of their seemingly enormous stingers.     While some wasps, especially social ones, are nuisance insects, a large number …

By Sandra Nelson  

In the last few years I have come to understand how important it is to make my garden inviting for pollinators such as bees and butterflies. Pollination by bees help support the four crops that make up 90% of the world’s food production while butterflies also act as pollinators and are …

  By Sandra Nelson  

The more I read about bees and their relatives, wasps and flies, the more fascinated I become with these tiny powerhouses and the more I understand why people are so passionate about providing for them and protecting them. As we mentioned in last week’s blog, honeybees may be the most well-known bee, …