Tree Care Tips

Imagine this: you’ve just come back from a two-week vacation. Your phone is dead, your suitcase is exploding with laundry… and your Zeylanica snake plant looks exactly the same as the day you left — tall, proud, and not a single droopy leaf in sight. That’s the magic of the Zeylanica snake plant (Dracaena trifasciata […]

Imagine taking one bite of your homemade phở or fresh spring rolls and being hit with an explosion of spicy, peppery citrus that makes your eyes widen and your guests beg for the secret. That secret? A thriving Vietnamese mint plant (Persicaria odorata) growing right on your kitchen counter or backyard. Yet every week I

One tiny mistake during tuber planting can turn your $12 dahlia tuber into a mushy, rotten mess by June… but get it right and that same tuber can explode into 50+ dinner-plate-sized blooms or 15 pounds of gourmet potatoes. I’ve made every mistake in the book (and lost hundreds of dollars of tubers) so you

Imagine stepping into your backyard on a warm June morning and spotting a bright yellow-and-black caterpillar the size of your finger happily munching away… then realizing an elegant Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is fluttering overhead, scouting for the perfect spot to lay her next clutch of eggs. That moment is pure garden magic — and it

Imagine stepping into your garden on a warm June evening and being greeted by a living wall of deep velvet-red flowers, each bloom the size of your hand, glowing against the sunset. That’s the magic of red clematis plants — few climbers deliver drama like they do. Yet every year, thousands of gardeners search desperately

Imagine this: one week your neon-pink Kenya tree coral is pulsing like a disco ball under your LEDs, the clowns are hosting in it, and you’re bragging on Instagram. The next week it’s closed tighter than a clam, dropping slimy branches all over your sand bed, and your reef group chat is screaming “It’s dying!!”

You’re racing through the Sunday crossword, pencil flying, when you hit 17-Across: “Plant that supposedly blooms once every hundred years (7 letters).” You scribble in “AGAVE”… then pause. Wait — there’s an actual plant called the century plant? Yes, and it’s one of the most jaw-dropping, low-maintenance, myth-shrouded succulents on earth. Spoiler: it does NOT

I’ll never forget the morning I almost lost my 6-foot fiddle-leaf fig. I walked into the sunroom with my coffee, looked up, and froze — hundreds of tiny black dots on plant leaves had appeared overnight. My stomach dropped. Was it a deadly fungus? Spider mites? Was my favorite plant doomed? If you’re reading this

Imagine this: Last spring, Sarah from Texas sent me two photos of the same hibiscus. The “before” picture showed a sad, leggy plant with three tiny flowers and yellowing leaves. Six weeks later — after switching to the exact fertilizer schedule I’m about to share — she sent the “after”: a bush absolutely exploding with

Two years ago I stood over a trash can full of 27 shriveled, black, completely dead azalea cuttings and almost gave up forever. Everyone kept saying “azaleas are hard to root,” and I believed them—until I accidentally discovered one tiny tweak that flipped my success rate from 3% to 98% literally overnight. Today, my backyard