The Middlebury Landscape

June may smell like roses, May smells like Lily of the Valley in my mind, but spring, sweet, sweet spring, smells like bark mulch. Like many things in Horticulture, mulching really isn’t for the plants, but for us. Meant to imitate the look and ecosystem of a forest floor, mulch does neither, but it is […]

Once you see one, you start seeing them everywhere. The first warm rain in the spring makes these spores appear on Red Cedar (Juniper) trees, completing part of its life cycle. Red Cedar is a first-growth conifer pretty common in Vermont in abandoned pastures, along roads, and elsewhere, so finding these disgusting things aren’t hard. […]

I’ve been reading quite a bit this fall in various newspapers, web sites, etc. about the science of leaf change, and I thought, well, heck, there goes another blog post. I don’t see the sense to retread ground others are covering. By now, you’ve probably read that leaf color changes by the shortening of day-length […]

The study of plant diseases made me terribly depressed in school, but also made me laugh on occasion. I imagined two plant pathologists walking around, looking at sick leaves. Of course, each of them wouldn’t admit to the other that they didn’t know or recognize some strange disease, so they’re making up names as they […]