One question that comes up this time of year a lot is what is the proper mulch to use for trees. It’s easy to grasp the basic premise of mulch, but when people go to their local nursery they see many different kinds. How do you know which one to use? The short answer: wood…
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Landscaping and landscape design goes beyond just creating beautiful designs. As a professional designer, it’s not only my job to create designs but also to envision every possibility of the mature landscape in years to come. And while most elements will remain what they are for years to come, the one thing that most do…
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Every day in America, each man, woman and child generates nearly four pounds of trash. That’s over one trillion pounds of solid waste or 365 trillion pounds each year. It’s a staggering statistic when you consider the environmental effect that much garbage has on our fragile ecosystem. As adults, it’s easy to forget the importance…
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Flowering Dogwood trees can be easily grown from seed, however 99.9999% of the seedlings that sprout will be Cornus Florida, which is White Flowering Dogwood. It doesn’t matter if you collect the seeds from a White Dogwood or a Pink Dogwood, the seedlings are likely to be white. The only predictable way to grow a…
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Apricots originated on the Russian-Chinese border in about 3000 BC and were imported along with peach seed into Europe through the “Silk Road” that extended camelback trading to the Mideast. The fruit grows as an escaped naturalized plant along modern roadsides in Turkey and Armenia today in abundant numbers. Apricots were known in ancient Greece…
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The documentation of ancient plums growing in antiquity is sparse. The best evidence of that oldest existence is best documented through America’s most famous pomologist, Luther Burbank, who reported in his twelve volume botanical literary classic, Small Fruits, Volume IV page 136, that the European plum, Prunus domestica, and its ancestor fruit originated in the…
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Peach trees, Prunus persica, are originally believed to have come from China to the Mideast through the trade routes known to extend to Turkey and Iran (Persia). The peach seeds could be used to plant and grow trees throughout North Africa and Europe and finally were introduced to America in the mid 1500’s. The first…
Read moreOlive trees, ‘Olea europaea,’ are the oldest fruit trees and certainly are one of the most important fruit trees in history. Olive tree culture has been closely connected to the rise and fall of Mediterranean empires and other advanced civilizations throughout the ages. Because olive trees offered wealth and future food supplies to established civilizations,…
Read moreHeroditus, the father of ancient history, recorded in the mid-400’s B.C., that oak trees were reputed to have within their boughs, the gift of prophecy. The presence of oak tree galls in oak trees is caused by insect larvae that tunnel inside the twigs. The oak tree branches can become infested with numerous little galls…
Read moreMulberry trees were well known in the ancient civilizations of the world. They were famous fruit trees, because of the delicious berry fruits that were abundantly produced by fast growing trees—loaded with huge green leaves that were eaten by livestock, along with the berries, and the leaves were used in the Orient to fatten silkworms…
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