If you can find some, take a spoon and drip a bit on the end of your tongue. Your taste buds will begin to rock the rumba, and you might need another lick or two.  Go ahead, I won't tell. Then, once you've satiated yourself with tupelo honey's flowery sweetness, put a bit of this yellow green nectar on a nice southern biscuit or a bit of toast. For those of us who can't eat wheat, Udi's basic white sandwich bread is a good companion, and as for biscuits, unless I make my own, I like 1-2-3 Gluten Free's mix best. "She's as sweet as tupelo honey," sang Van Morrison, and if that's true, she was something for tupelo honey is the rarest in the world. I'd heard about it all my life, and finally when Diva and I were walking through Williams-Sonoma last Friday, I saw it for the...

Dear Carol, Mary Ann and all of our dear friends, We've hit those days of summer which separate true gardeners from those who only visit the greenhouse mid-April, buy forty flats of annuals and then leave them out in the sun to die. Although I profess to being a gardener, right now, I want to bury my head in the red sand. The garden may look pretty in pictures, but at the moment, I hate it. Oklahoma had a lot of rain in spring and early summer. The heavens kept pouring down the wet stuff which sounds good and makes for a green state, but my garden isn't set up for all this moisture. I've fought red spider mites, mildew, blackspot and hoards of grasshoppers already, and there's a month to go before temperatures even think of cooling down. Because of all the rain, my xeric plants freaked out, and...

I'm not all about natives. You know that. I grow named cultivars of roses, phlox, daylilies, crapemyrtles and pretty much anything else which will grow and bloom in Oklahoma. Monarch caterpillar on butterfly weed. I do weeds really well too. After neglecting my garden while I hoofed it off to Buffalo and St. Louis, the weeds were trying for world domination again. While grappling and pulling some this afternoon, I noticed many of the native flowers in my garden perform a kind of double duty. Whether you believe in God, evolution, or a mixture of the two, a lot of native plants seem to be created to help out multiple creatures. Take butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa, a/k/a pleurisy root. It is part of the Milkweed (Asclepiadaceae) family, and Monarch caterpillars can't seem to get enough of it. Further, when it is blooming, nearly every butterfly is attracted to its bright...

Doug Green, a friend of mine from Garden Writers Association, asked several of us to do a guest post on his blog about designing a garden. I took up the mantle and wrote about one of my favorite subjects, bright flowers. I'm giving y'all a link to his site to see my contribution and others. We all have such different ideas, and I think that's what makes this interesting. Hope you're staying cool during our hot weather. I'm indoors thinking about what to buy at our local nursery once August Bucks start, and everything is half price. It's nice to dream.