Bulbs can be forced to bloom by providing the environmental conditions to encourage growth. Tulips are some of the earliest spring-blooming bulbs that can be forced early.
The late winter months may lack color in the landscape, but with proper planning and a little effort, you can create an early spring indoors or make a beautiful gift by forcing your own succession
Trees stop the production of green pigment chlorophyll, revealing carotenoid pigments that give way to yellow. Anthocyanin pigments are responsible for purple and maroon colors of leaves in fall. Fallen leaves can be raked and used as mulch in landscape beds and gardens or composted.
—LSU AgCenter/Heather Kirk-Ballard
Shorter, cooler days bring brilliant foliage color changes for many trees and shrubs in fall.
Stickers, also known as sticker weed, spurweed and lawn burweed, germinate in lawns in the fall and produce painful stickers in the spring.
—LSU AgCenter/Ron Strahan
Nothing spoils a nice barefooted walk through the lawn more than sticker weed (Soliva pterosperma and Soliva sessilis).
Abundant nectar produced by goldenrod attracts pollinators such as bees. Goldenrod produces strap-like leaves that help distinguish it from ragweed.
—LSU AgCenter/Heather Kirk-Ballard
If you are like me, you suffer from seasonal allergies — sneezing, headaches, itchy eyes and coughing, all due to pollen from local, native plants that bloom in autumn.
Turk’s cap is a hummingbird favorite with its red tubular flowers. It makes an excellent flowering shrub for the landscape. Red tubular flowers are a food magnet for hummingbirds.
—LSU AgCenter/Heather Kirk-Ballard
Take a look around and you’ll see that many flowering perennials are beginning their fall bloom. One of the greatest admirers of these plants is the hummingbird, along with other pollinators.
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