Michellepedia

How to Survive a Heat Wave

A Nelson Long Neck sounds like beer to me. A new kind of frosty, delicious beer. This explains why I got so excited when a reader wrote to suggest I try one while the weather is hot. But then the Nelson turned out to be a brightly colored hose nozzle ($12.95), with eight different spray settings and an ergonomic comfort handle. "The colors are a bit bright, but you can always find them in the grass," wrote Stephen, a gardener whose plants are no doubt surviving this summer's heat wave very happily.  (He also had nice things to say about customer service at Mastergardening.com, which replaced his nozzle promptly after a metal clip failed.)

Me? I'll be the person standing in the front yard, holding a hose in one hand and a sweating Bud in the other.

Clematis vs. Cabbage

After I wrote about my obsession with planting clematis vines everywhere -- on the trellis, on the fence, on a wire pyramid garden structure  that I bought in desperation after I ran out of trellises and walls -- I heard from a number of readers who were similarly addicted. Deborah, a clematis lover who has 110 cultivars in her garden, suggested I make room for some of her favorites: "Please try durandi (herbaceous) and regency or julia correvan (climbers)...just to mention 3."

Even Henry David Thoreau had a soft spot for the velvety flowering vines, although he apparently considered their frivolous beauty a luxury that not everyone could appreciate:  "The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage."

In my garden, it turned out, there's only room for clematis.

 

Top sites to buy plants online

Think of the Garden Watchdog as a specialized Better Business Bureau for plant buyers. The database rates -- with customer reviews -- more than 4,700 online merchants who sell gardening products. Among the top 30 most highly rated companies are Just Joey's Roses ("Very impressed with the quality of the yellow rose plant I received in the mail"), Oakes Daylilies ("Love them! Love them! Love them!") and Classy Groundcovers ("Received bare root liriope today in excellent condition").

Thanks, Bob, for suggesting the site.