Cold Climate Gardening

That is the question–sorry, Hamlet. And White Flower Farm has some help with the answer: an article on Plants Slow to Break Dormancy. They have a lot of other articles in the Newsletter section of their Garden Help.

Popularity: 11% [?]

If you want to learn more about the plants native to your area, a good place to start would be The New England Wild Flower Society Guide to Growing and Propagating Wildflowers of the United States and Canada by William Cullina. He has done a good job creating a general reference work that can help both novice and advanced gardeners, whether they are attempting habitat restoration or just looking for plants that will do well in a problem area (too wet, too dry and the like).

Not only does he avoid preaching, but he also recognizes that not all of his readers will care to limit themselves to plants native to their region:

While I encourage you to grow and appreciate the plants of your area, I know that we all as gardeners like to seek out the challenge of something new and different, so whenever possible I have included information to aid you in growing a particular plant outside its native range.

In fact, all the information he provides seems aimed to enable you, the gardener, to successfully grow native wildflowers, no matter what your underlying philosophy. His section on Ecological Gardening could be renamed Sensible Gardening, as it discusses the various conditions necessary for plant life and how to best match plants to the conditions at your site. If you’re completely new to the whole idea of habitat gardening, a map will help you locate your floristic province, which is discussed in the pages following the map.

Popularity: 9% [?]