Cold Climate Gardening
One of the longest-running garden blogs on the web, Cold Climate Gardening also provides links, book reviews, and plant profiles to help you garden successfully. Freelance author Kathy Purdy shares her gardening insights with you. Come join the conversation!

• Flowering Houseplants to Stave Off Cabin Fever: Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day January 2012
  The weather outside is finally frightful (subzero Fahrenheit as I write this, and dropping), so I can’t show you the pansy that had been blooming in the unseasonably mild weather. I do have more blooms than usual in the house for January, thanks to a thoughtful friend, a container plant wintering indoors, and an impulse [...]
• Two Houses: Dioecious Plants, part 6
  Imagine having a garden composed of only female plants. It could be considered a goddess garden. Think how subtle that would be. I wonder how long it would take for visitors to discover the organizing principle. It might be the solution for persons with pollen allergies or provide cuts for their house. I could have [...]
• Two Houses: Dioecious Plants, part 5
  I had a hard time thinking of a vegetable that belonged with this group and then it hit me: Asparagus. Named varieties are usually all male but the grower missed this one. Asparagus is my number one favorite vegetable and the plants from the garden are the sweetest I’ve tasted. Male and female are equally [...]
• Two Houses: Dioecious Plants, part 4
  I never considered it before I started looking for these plants but some of them exhibit sexual dimorphism, an obvious physical difference between male and female. The Silene is a good example. The male leaves are narrower, its sepals are pigmented and the flowers are smaller but more abundant. The females are a brighter white, [...]
• Two Houses: Dioecious Plants, part 3
  The swelling flower buds of Red Maples give some of the first colorings in spring, letting us know that most of winter is behind us. The open flowers reveal that they’re part of this group, too. Another dioecious American native is Kentucky Coffee Tree with the challenging name Gymnocladus dioica (jim-NOK-lad-us dy-oh-EYE-kuh, try it, it’s [...]
• Two Houses: Dioecious Plants, part 2
  In the Oakland hills near the Berkeley border is Chapel of the Chimes, a columbarium. Renovated and expanded by Julia Morgan, the architect of Hearst Castle in San Simeon, it is a melding of Spanish and Gothic styles with arches, latticing and copious stained glass. I’ve been visiting since I was very young and it [...]
• Two Houses: Dioecious Plants, part 1
  The street I grew up on was lined with Sycamore trees. Their leafy masses were a delight in summer and always produced some good-natured grumbling during fall raking. These were small city lots and as time moved on problems developed. Blocked sewer lines became common and sidewalks started to lift and shift, making walking difficult [...]
• Dragon Wing Red Begonia: Garden Bloggers Bloom Day December 2011
  This spring, Ball Horticultural sent me some Dragon Wing Red Begonias to trial in my garden. My sister-in-law had told me that she dug up and potted her wax begonias, wintered them over as houseplants, and replanted them every spring, and this gave me the idea to try the same thing with these larger begonias. [...]
• Mulch Can Kill Trees
  Mulch can kill trees–that sounds kind of extreme, doesn’t it? But it caught your attention, right? I suppose it would be more accurate to say improper mulching can kill trees, but as I look around me, improper mulching of trees seems to be the standard practice, the only kind of mulching around trees that’s being [...]
• Colchicums Sprouting in the Bag: New Garden
  When we first started the process of buying our new house, I thought we’d be moving in August. In early July I started digging up colchicum corms as the leaves died down, indicating they were going dormant. It turns out the first date proposed for closing on a house is usually wildly optimistic, and my [...]