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The research is pretty conclusive that spending time outdoors is good for people. The fresh air, the sunlight, the chance to connect with our natural surroundings are all good for physical and mental health. But time outdoors is good for plants, too, as my mother demonstrated this summer.

For a couple of years, she’s had a succulent dish that we put together. She was inspired by one of the articles in Northern Gardener. The dish has struggled a bit, partly because the plants in it had different watering needs. This summer, she decided to move the dish out to her back patio. The patio faces south, is somewhat protected from wind by the house and a privacy fence, and, of course, is open to natural rain.

Here’s what the succulent dish looked like a couple of weeks ago just before she moved it back into the house.

 

 

Here’s the before shot: (You can see she lost a few plants, but the survivors are huge now.)

 

I had a similar experience a few years ago when I put a hoya plant outdoors for the summer. The plant, which had never bloomed before, suddenly was spouting cool, waxy blooms. Interestingly, once it started blooming, it now blooms every year, near the end of the summer. I still put the plant outdoors and it is very happy.

In a recent article on herbs, Nancy Leasman calls these plants “commuters” because they travel in and out of the house. Do you have any commuter plants?

 

 

 

 

A year ago today, I posted a photo of my first bloom on 2012 — a pretty little Iris reticulata. The photo at left is what that space in the garden looks like today. It’s covered in about 6 inches of snow, with another few inches expected today and next week.

I don’t expect to see any blooms this year until mid-April, if then, given our colder than average March. I can’t hate the snow too much, though, because it will likely help with the drought we’re experiencing. Also, the longer it stays cold, the less likely we’ll have a repeat of last year’s March madness with fruit trees, including my poor cherry tree, blooming too early and then suffer frost in April.

Is this a normal March? It certainly feels closer to “normal” than some we have had in the past. But, these days, it’s not clear what normal is.

 

 

Over this past weekend, I had a chance to attend the Chicago Flower and Garden Show, as part of a Garden Writers Association meeting. This is my second time at the show, and I really enjoy the colors, the flowers and the great information we garden writers are exposed to. (More on that in future posts.)

But the truth about the gardens at home and garden shows is they are not real. Just like Hollywood starlets did not start out that thin or with that perfectly styled big hair, the flowers at these shows have been manipulated and tarted up. The plants are all in pots and they have been forced to bloom earlier and harder than they normally would with the addition of fertilizer and extra light. By the end of the shows, some look very sad. But to remember their glory, I’m putting up a picture of the flower garden I enjoyed the most, a fantastic collage of tulips.

As Roy Diblik, a very thoughtful nursery owner from Wisconsin noted, “they are entertainers. They’re in some pain out there, but they are putting on a show.”

 

 

Hedges are great additions to gardens, providing a green background to other plantings and screening out views you do not want to see, whether that is a utility area around your house or a neighbor’s yard. But they can be tricky to grow and keep looking neat and full at the same time.

Friday I attended a special event at Otten Bros. in Long Lake featuring Jamie Durie of HGTV’s The Outdoor Room with Jamie Durie. (Full disclosure: My ticket to the event was complimentary.) Jamie had a lot of good advice about designing human-scale spaces, but I thought this video clip on what to do if you have a hole your hedge was worth passing on. Bottom line: If you have a hole, make a bigger one!