Is your week hectic like mine? Running from one task to another? Juggling family, career, household, volunteer activities, and more…leaving no time for the landscape? After the day is done and you drive into your neighborhood and approach your driveway, are you squinting your eyes filtering out what uglies lurk in your landscape? As you enter your home, throw your keys and mail on the counter, do you shut the blinds to hide what you don’t want to see outside? If you answered, “yes” to any of these questions, you have LAS, Landscape Avoidance Syndrome…………..O.K., I just made that up but many of us suffer from it! How about making a spring and summer resolution? Thou shalt make thy dwelling beautiful! Perhaps, like many, you’re inexperienced at this, have no idea where to start, and you’re overwhelmed. Hopefully, the following tips will take the fear out of gardening and get…
Category: Newsletters and Member Articles
Looking Forward to Spring Ephermerals
Once again the spring ephemerals are carpeting the forest and woodland floor only to be quickly admired and sleep again until next year. Spring ephemerals (i fem’ ur als) are plants whose glory lasts but a few days but the memory of their haunting beauty will remain with you for months come. You will find yourself looking expectantly for their return the following spring. These native wonders emerge before the trees leaf out as they must acquire enough sunlight to produce seed and store energy before the forest canopy fills in. Then they fade away until next year. Let’s walk gingerly along an imaginary path and enjoy the fleeting beauty of spring’s earliest wonders. Hepatica americana, Liverleaf, is one of the earliest harbingers of spring. It bears dainty 1/2” white flowers blushed with pink or deep blue. The flowers are born on stalks which leap into view directly from the…
A Bit of Dirt – Winter 2007
The full pdf copy of this edition is available here. PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE By Glenn Parsons Hello all my Master Gardener friends and Happy New Year. I am honored to have the opportunity to deliver this message in our quarterly newsletter. The newsletter is something all of us enjoy reading since it keeps us in touch with what Master Gardeners are doing in Gwinnett County. I encourage any Master Gardener who wants to share gardening knowledge or experiences to submit an article for publication in our newsletter. Today I walked in my garden and found things to be rather desolate on this winter day in Georgia. I did find a Daphne odora beginning to flower, a few Hellebores buds forming under the cover of fallen oak leaves, and, popping out of the ground, Cardamine diphylla (grandma called it “Tooth Wort”). We gardener’s can find wonderful things on the bleakest of days….