Grow one of the oldest American cultivated plants and join the Incas and Aztecs who grew – and revered – sunflowers more than 4,600 years ago.

It can be tempting to create a rainbow of riotous shades in container gardens, but are they as pretty as you imagine? Too many colors can be distracting and disjointed, giving your containers a haphazard, messy look.

Once upon a time, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary grew her garden with silver bells and cockleshells, but nowadays, most gardeners use some other forms of fertilizer that are better formulated than nursery rhymes.

It’s vacation time! You’re going to be gone for two weeks or more, your friends, neighbors and family members are all busy and the weatherman says it’s going to be “hot, hot, hot.” What about your houseplants?

One of the most common and easy to recognize plant diseases, powdery mildew, is caused by fungus spores that overwinter in garden debris and are spread by wind the following season. In late spring and early summer, the warmer days and high humidity provide perfect conditions for spore germination.

You can enjoy much more than plants in your garden every evening and into the night, and in fact the right accessories can beautifully enhance your garden even as twilight falls. Consider these stunning accessories and accents to turn your daytime garden into a nighttime paradise.

Did you know that a ladybug can devour up to 50 aphids or more in a day? They also attack scale, mealybugs and leaf hopper, but not on your precious garden plants or seedlings. Invite ladybugs to your garden – they dine only on insects and won’t harm your plants in any way.

Hydrangeas and are widely acclaimed for their large, showy blossoms that lend fabulous color to gardens from mid- to late summer. Their luxuriant dark green foliage offers a striking background to their large round or smooth blossoms.

Few perennials can match the daylily (Hemerocallis) for versatility and durability. One of the most popular perennials, daylilies have become a collector plant for novice and experienced gardeners alike.

Beautiful and dependable, Echinacea purpurea, or purple coneflower, is the crowning glory of the summer perennial garden. A member of the Aster family, all Echinacea species are native to North America. The genus Echinacea is derived from the Greek ‘echino’ meaning hedgehog, a reference to the spiny center disc flowers.