The "Jungle" refers to Elizabeth Wahle's personal St. Louis Metro East garden and it provides the backdrop for her writings about building and sustaining viable food webs and ecosystems within the home landscape.
Sometimes a tree becomes a hazard
This is the time of year I prefer to take down any trees that have died or become a hazard in the garden. I say “prefer” because sometimes you don’t have the luxury of waiting. I experienced this last year when a large tree lodged over as a result of heavy rains...
Nothing in a nursery catalog catches my attention more than the word “new.” This term is usually applied to a plant that is new to the U.S. market, either as a new release from breeders, a wild plant recently brought into cultivation, or a plant already established on the overseas markets. And,...
The itch to garden
I’m not there yet, but I know I’ll start getting the planting bug once the garden catalogs start arriving in the mail. I have developed several criteria a plant must have before I even consider acquiring it for my garden though.
Cold hardiness
Heat tolerance
Somewhat...
Providing winter hospitality to both vertebrate (birds mammals, lizards, etc.) and invertebrate (insects, spiders, worms, etc) wildlife is an important consideration when tidying the garden at the end of the season.
It really is a balancing act on how much fall cleanup to do. On the one hand,...
Unlike the other plants in my garden, turf grass has always struggled to get my attention. Compared to my knowledge of food crops and herbaceous perennials, I know next to nothing about turf grasses…and I would prefer to keep it that way. Some would find that hard to believe, but it’s true....
Evidently every day this summer I deemed too hot to work in the garden was just another day for the weeds to celebrate and use their heat-miser advantage over me to grow and multiply. As a result, I am now spending most of my gardening time attempting to catch up on weeding in an effort to go into...
I admire the knowledge of plant biologists, especially that group of expert botanists who make me feel like a novice in comparison…those are the people I love to hang around with at any given opportunity to improve my own skills and knowledge. Every time I look up a plant description, a little...
When you collect plants, it is rather useful to label and record everything added to the garden. I wish I had started sooner. I did not do this the first few years of starting my current garden, so many of my oldest plants are unknown down to cultivar and remain unlabeled. After a few years, I...
Watching how plants grow is just fascinating. Like when a terminal bud begins growing in the spring after being dormant, it leaves behind a bud scale scar that encircles the entire twig or branch and is visible to the naked eye. Since each twig makes only one terminal bud per year, you can use...
How perfect for Punxsutawney Phil to predict six more weeks of winter on the day when snow was falling heavily in the St Louis Metropolitan. School would have been cancelled when and where I grew up in Indiana on a day like that. But because of COVID-19, snow days for students are coming to be a...
