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Beautiful Flowers for Rain Gardens

Beautiful Flowers for Rain Gardens Featured Image
This summer rain garden shows a mix of flower favorites. (Image by David Steakly)

Any low, wet area in the yard where rainwater runoff collects after a storm has the potential to be a spectacular, flower-filled rain garden. Maintaining these landscape reservoirs as beneficial gardens rather than stressed turf will save time and headaches and improve your yard’s looks—as long as you plant the right plants and create a design for all-season bloom.

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Bald Cypress for the Landscape

Bald Cypress for Landscapes Featured Image
Bald cypress “knees” are an interesting characteristic of mature specimens planted in moist soils.

Even if you’ve never been to the Southeast U.S., you’re probably familiar with one of its signature plant communities: the bald cypress swamp. Nothing looks more “Deep South” than a flooded grove of buttress-trunked Taxodium distichum draped with Spanish moss. It might surprise you then to learn that bald cypress makes an excellent (and hardy) subject for all sorts of garden situations in regions as cold as USDA Hardiness Zone (minus 10 to minus 20 F).
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Wishbone Flowers for Shade Garden Color

Wishbone Flowers for Shade Gardens Featured Image
The flowers of Torenia Summer Wave® Large Blue look spectacular close up.

Gardeners the world over have long suffered from a common ailment—we covet plants, climate conditions, and time that we don’t have. This is especially true of gardeners with shady landscapes. Our gardens may support all kinds of ferns, but we want roses. Hostas the size of small houses sprout without any help at all while we pine for sunflowers. The list of “wants” versus realities goes on and on.
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