Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i Horticulture

Happy New Year, readers! I imagine this issue of Horticulture finds you reflecting on the 2025 gardening year and looking forward to spring. In 2025, my challenges proved to be the same as in years past: bold and hungry rabbits, and extremely dry weather from midsummer into autumn. I’ve identified that time of year as the gap in my garden’s appeal—an observation Jared Barnes recommends making in this issue’s feature “Always in Season” (32). In 2026, I hope to improve my August view. On the bright side this past year, I started seeds of several cosmos I trusted to be just the right height for my front-steps pots (two feet), and indeed they were! These included pale yellow ‘Xanthos’, peachy pink ‘Xsenia’ and the aptly named ‘Apricot Lemonade’. If “Any-Space…

ANDREW BUNTING has perhaps the most comprehensive resume in horticulture. He interned at the Morton Arboretum, the Chicago Botanic Garden, Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden and Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College. Following those, he worked for Penelope Hobhouse and Gordon Collier in Britain and New Zealand. Returning to the U.S., he had a stint at Chanticleer before returning to the Scott Arboretum, where he worked for 27 years and developed its American Public Garden Association–recognized collections of Magnolia, Quercus and Ilex. Bunting has joined many international plant-collecting trips, including journeys with Dan Hinkley, Scott McMahan and Ozzie Johnson. In 2015, he took a job at the Chicago Botanic Garden, where he restarted the Plant Collecting Collaborative, an international group of public gardens engaged in exploration and cultivation of wild-collected species. Next,…

The seasonality of plantings is one of my favorite aspects of gardening. When we plan and design our gardens so that they offer something anew regularly, they are even more engaging. Every week the garden brings something different to celebrate. Unfortunately, many plantings feature commonplace plants that are meant to look the same year-round with little maintenance. Or we make the mistake of buying all the flowers the garden center carries in the excitement of spring. We cram them into the holes in our gardens but then watch them fade away as the second half of the year hits. Building seasonal interest in the garden is a practice that we must conscientiously strive toward. The secret isn’t simply adding more plants; it’s choosing more plants that work harder across multiple…

When I moved into my 1915 cottage in East Norwalk, Connecticut, in the spring of 2018, I immediately set about transforming the tiny back yard. I added four new raised beds for vegetables, herbs, and flowers, and a new garden bed with canna lilies that reached above the six-foot-tall fence and became the talk of the neighborhood. Three Vanilla Strawberry hydrangea trees resembled graceful ballerinas—their top panicles held upright like a head, their central burst of blossoms forming a solid body and the heaviest flowers drooping toward the ground, as if in a curtsy. But one feature of my new property drove me crazy: A rat-infested, leaky-roofed, dirt-floored, falling-down ancient garage. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had housed the first occupant’s Model T. The previous owners had tried to…

THE YEAR 2025 started strong. Returning in mid-March from warmer climes, I saw that the southern New England winter was not as severe as I had feared. My snowdrops and crocus were more advanced than usual. The fig bushes had plenty of healthy-looking green tips, though I had not protected them with burlap or cocooned them with dried fall leaves. The collected varieties of daffodils had begun their always welcome four- or five-week-long cheerful display. Yet as spring went on, it never really warmed up, with long stretches of cloudy, damp days lasting into June—the kind of spring that drives some New Englanders to tarry in Florida or Arizona a bit, if not a lot, longer. On the bright side, the flowers of the bulbs, magnolias, ornamental cherries and apples,…

“CONES CAN BE WORKS of art, and many are well worth keeping as ornaments if you are lucky enough to find them,” writes Adrian Bloom in the classic Gardening with Conifers. These plants delight with their shapes, sizes, colors and textures. Their unique fruits are an added fascination. Conifers bear distinct male and female flowers, usually on the same plant. The flowers themselves have a cone-like appearance, but they’re fleshy and sometimes colorful. Pollen moves from male flower to the female on the wind. Seeds develop as the female cone matures and eventually releases them—in some species years later. The shapes and sizes of cones vary by genus and even species. Cones of pines (Pinus) tend to be woody, with overlapping scales that protect the seeds. Pinecones range significantly in…

Walking along the unassuming gray fence surrounding Wyck, a National Historic Landmark in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, passersby might have no idea that one of the oldest rose gardens in the country grows on its other side. Unless, of course, that visitor was walking by in May, when the alluring aroma of thousands of blooming roses would woo anyone into entering the tranquil garden space. “There’s something indescribable about this place,” said Wyck’s executive director, Kim Staub. “We just refer to it as ‘Wyckishness,’ a sense of peace and beauty and calm.” Wyck’s landscape remains largely the same as it did hundreds of years ago when newlywed Jane Bowne Haines moved into her country home. In 1821, she decided to convert the kitchen garden into a rose garden. Now widely considered…

Sun-ripened tomatoes and peppers are the highlight of my summer vegetable garden. Members of the nightshade family (Solanaceae), tomatoes and peppers have similar needs and make good planting partners. They aren’t difficult to grow, but the best possible harvest requires a bit of pre-season planning. Here are my best strategies. The Basics There are two main types of tomatoes, related to their growth habit: determinate, or bush; and indeterminate, or vining. Determinate varieties grow to a predetermined height—usually three to four feet—and then bloom and produce all their fruits at once. Their compact size makes them a good choice for raised beds and containers, but their brief fruiting cycle means a lot of tomatoes to deal with at once. (Canning is an option.) Indeterminate tomato plants can reach seven feet…

Amelanchier × grandiflora am-el-ANK-ee-er: From a French name for one of the species gran-dih-FLOOR-uh: From Latin grandis, large, and flora, flower Amsonia hubrichtii am-SO-nee-uh: For John Amdon, colonial physician and botanist hew-BRICK-tee-eye: For Leslie Hubricht, American biologist Andropogon gerardii and-row-POE-gone: From Greek andros, man, and pogon, beard ger-AR-dee-eye: For Louis Gerard, French botanist Buxus sempervirens BUCK-sus: Latin word for boxwoods sem-per-VEER-ens: From Latin semper, always, and virens, green Cedrus deodara SED-rus: Latin for cedar dee-oh-DAH-rah: From the name for this tree in northern India Cercis canadensis SIR-sis: From Greek kerkis, weaver’s shuttle can-ah-DEN-siss: Of Canada Cornus florida CORE-nus: Latin for horn FLOR-ih-duh: From Latin flos, flower Cotinus coggygria co-TIE-nus: From Greek kotinus, olive codge-ee-GREE-uh: From kokkugia, Greek word for smoke bushes C. obovatus ob-oh-VAY-tus: From Latin ob, reverse, and ovum,…