A screen grab of the Missouri Botancial Gardens website, which columnist Julie Brocklehurst-Woods says has helpful information for home gardeners.
MASTER GARDENER
Missouri website helps germinate garden ideas
The website for Missouri Botanical Garden is one of my favorite online resources for gardening. Their climate is similar to ours (zone 6, Rochester and northern Livingston County), so most of the plants grown there can be considered for our gardens. Their site contains features I just can’t find elsewhere.
My Master Gardener training encouraged me to rely heavily on the researched-based information available through Cornell and other land grant universities, but Cornell does not have all the information I need or want. The Cornell site, which I plan to discuss soon in a separate article, contains a lot of information pertinent to agriculture and other audiences served by Extension. This can make the information I need more difficult to find. While Missouri Botanical Garden helps connect the public with Missouri Extension resources, they have a much greater focus on gardens.
To find Home Gardening: Google “Missouri Botanical Garden,” then click on “Gardens and Gardening” from the horizontal menus. Click on the center menu title, “Help for the Home Gardener.” You can then choose from several topics on the vertical menu on the left side. Additional topics are under some of the visible titles, so be sure to mouse over all of them.
Today I thought I might focus on the topic of landscape design, as an example for using this site. From that left vertical menu I click on “Lawn, Landscape and Garden Design,” then select “Garden Design.” Voila, you are reading a short article broken down into five steps: locate utilities, define the space, make a plan, select plants, periodic re-design. Embedded in the article are links to various resources you might need, on and off this site.
One of the more difficult tasks in designing a garden is bloom time: making sure you always have flowers in bloom, and coordinating blooming colors. This site includes bloom time data: when flowers in this garden are in bloom, with records available by months and week. For example, you can see what flowers are typically in bloom the third week in July. I am not aware of any other site that makes this information available.
Another outstanding source of information on this site is the Plants of Merit designation. These plant varieties have been selected by the following criteria: easy to grow and maintain; not known to be invasive; resistant or tolerant to diseases and insects; outstanding ornamental value; reasonably available to purchase.
To see a complete list, click on Plant Finder, scroll down to the Quick Search box, check the box in front of Plants of Merit. This will give you a list of 228 plants. If you wanted to narrow this, click additional boxes in the Quick Search.
Now that you know how to get started, you should be able to spend a wintry afternoon getting ideas for that better garden in the upcoming year.
P.S. — I am not a garden designer, but I would probably start a new garden bed with a focal point: a small tree, larger shrub or group of plants to focus the view, then add accessory plants. A larger garden bed may need a path, to break up the planting vistas.
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Julie Brocklehurst-Woods has been a Master Gardener Volunteer with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Livingston County for more than 10 years.
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