For years, City of Laurel residents—and those in surrounding counties and municipalities —have had to navigate a gray area when growing wildlife gardens. A widely used legal code dating to the 1970s...

Dear Miss Floribunda, I have been growing strawberries for four years now and have learned from mistakes I made the first year. I learned to water regularly and to add a lot of compost to improve drainage....

Do you have a garden bed that causes you to wince as you pass by? Whether it’s filled with a tangle of overgrown weeds or simply dead plants, it can make you feel embarrassed or like a failed gardener....

Dear Miss Floribunda, I’ll bet it makes you cringe to receive yet another complaint about deer in the garden. This time, I am going to beg you not to even mention any of the solutions that I don’t...

Many turn toward native gardening with the hope of reducing their yard work. In my experience, a well-designed wildlife garden eventually eliminates most annual maintenance. After establishment, there...

As children, most of us wander in the woods and see trees and leaves, and have little sense of species, lifecycles or plant relationships with animals. Most people I meet remain at this level of knowledge...

Dear Miss Floribunda, Last year I had earthworms in my garden, and this year I don’t. My family and I moved into a house with a backyard veggie patch, and I decided to put in some tomato and bean plants,...

Dear Miss Floribunda, I moved to this area from the Pacific Northwest (Washington) three years ago. I have tried but failed to grow my favorite flowers for two of those years. Because I adore the color...

Dear Miss Floribunda,  I very much enjoyed the informative talk given by Kathy Jentz, editor of Washington Gardener magazine, at My Dead Aunt's Books in October. I am sorry I didn’t think to record...

Dear Miss Floribunda, The heat and drought this summer have taken a toll on my garden. Only the geraniums that line my front walk seem OK. The leaves on my azaleas and hydrangeas have turned yellow and...

Dear Miss Floribunda, When I was a child in a Gulf Coast state in the 1960s and ’70s, my granny grew super-fragrant sweet peas in every color of the rainbow along the chain-link fence between her little...

Dear Miss Floribunda, Is it too early to neaten up my garden? In past columns you’ve advised not hacking down goldenrod, sunflowers, ironweed and other tall plants in autumn and waiting till warm weather...