All the Dirt on Gardening

April is Azalea season in our growing zone 7 with landscapes and parks in full bloom everywhere we go. The southern states had their full bloom season last month and Oregon will get to celebrate the beauty of Azaleas next month. The big box stores, garden centers and nurseries are loaded with a wide variety of container-grown Azaleas for your garden and this is the ideal time to plant them. But with so many sizes, colors and varieties to choose among, making the right choices can be challenging.  Encore re-blooming azaleas at Lowe's While most of us look at color as our first criteria, there are other qualities to consider such as size at maturity, length of bloom time, and the ideal location to ensure long-lived beauty. Azaleas are close cousins of Rhododendrons and many garden books, websites and catalogs still put them together in the same section so look for them there when doing your research for the perfect plants. They are so close, in fact that growing in...

Some of the Rhododendrons at Lendonwood Gardens in Grove have already bloomed but many are still in flower as are a hundred other shrubs, trees and perennials.  Dr. Len Miller Last week, Lendonwood’s founder Len Miller led a tour during which he pointed out many of the best plants and a few that are difficult to grow here. The plants Miller highlighted on the tour included: Japanese Birch (hard to grow), Japanese Maple (fast growing and makes lots of seedlings), Dawn Redwood (fast growing), Variegated elm (full sun, beautiful leaves), Bloodgood Maple (red seed pods), Styrax Japonica (white flowers), Weeping Katsura Magnifica (heart-shaped leaves on weeping branches), Japanese Variegated Dogwood (tough to grow), Rising Sun Redbud (will be available from Greenleaf Nursery this fall), Cherokee Sunset Dogwood (variegated leaves and pink flowers), and Cornus Kousa Wolf Eyes (The best dogwood with white rimmed leaves and white flowers). A walk through Lendonwood Gardens includes touring m...

Dr. Leonard Miller Knows Rhododendrons Rhododendrons are members of the Heath plant family, a large collection of thousands of evergreen and deciduous shrubs that includes Azaleas. Gardeners distinguish between rhododendrons and azaleas but plant botanists do not. Usually, rhododendrons are evergreen and usually azaleas are deciduous. There are other distinctions between the two in the leaf shape, number of stamens, etc. What they have in common is a wide range of flower colors and their growing needs. Past president of the American Rhododendron Society, Len Miller, has a collection of 300-rhododendrons at his Lendonwood Gardens in Grove OK. Miller said that anyone who wants to grow rhododendrons in Oklahoma has to realize that all growing conditions have to be met and all are essential. He outlined those conditions as acid soil, moisture and drainage. "Their natural growing location is on the northern slope of a mountain," Miller said. "They have to be well protected i...