Roses

We’ve been blown away by the amazing Spring blooms at Gill’s this week! We’re always on the go, but no plant person can resist stopping to smell fresh roses or to brush against a Copper Canyon Daisy to release the wonderful scent. If you want to bring some fragrance to your landscape, here’s what we’d recommend planting now.

Sweet Mademoiselle Rose

The cool weather this week really brought out the color of our Sweet Mademoiselle Rose blooms! This is a new variety bred for the color and excellent disease resistance. The scent is soft, delicate, and unique – sort of like a rosy tea.

Almond Verbena

Almond Verbena blooms might be our favorite scent in the garden. They really do smell like sweet almonds, and when the wind is just right, you can smell them all the way across the garden center! Great cold hardy, tough, and drought tolerant plant for shady/partial sun spots. Easy to prune to your desired shape, and to encourage more blooms.

Maid of Orleans Jasmine

Maid of Orleans aka Arabian Jasmine is a vining evergreen shrub with wonderfully fragrant flowers that are used for tea and in the perfume industry. The fragrance is similar to Star Jasmine – sweet and intense! Hummingbirds and butterflies love it too.

Night Blooming Jasmine

Night Blooming Jasmine is not a true Jasmine, but it gets its name from the fragrant white blooms. It’s actually part of the Solanaceae family which includes potatoes and tomatoes. The blooms open at night an emit a very strong (in a good way) scent. Think of Night Blooming Jasmine as more of a sprawling woody shrub than a vine. Once established, they’re cold tolerant down to about 25 degrees.

Copper Canyon Daisy

Copper Canyon Daisy aka Mountain Marigold is native to the Southwest US and Northern Mexico. The bright yellow flowers are attractive to bees and butterflies, but its the foliage that smells so good. The fragrance that’s released when you brush against the plant is difficult to describe. Maybe fresh rain + a hint of lemon?

Arp Rosemary

We rarely meet a rosemary variety that we don’t like – they all smell great, and they have subtle differences in scent and flavor. We’re excited about Arp Rosemary this Spring because it’s cold hardy down to 20 degrees! Great in the ground or in a pot with an upright growth habit.

Citronella Geranium

Some would call the scent of Citronella Geraniums pungent, and others adore it. The most common use of the plant and it’s strong scent is to repel mosquitoes. Place it near the door or along walkways, and periodically disturb the foliage with a broom to release the fragrance.

Texas Kidneywood

Kidneywood is a Texas native shrub/small tree with delicately fragrant blooms and leaves. Kidneywood likes a location with dappled light (some sun/some shade) and is both cold hardy and drought tolerant. The blooms attract bees and butterflies and the wood is sometimes used for dyes.

Mexican Mint Marigold

Mexican Mint Marigold aka Mexican Tarragon or Texas Tarragon is an aromatic herb with beautiful flowers and a fragrance similar to anise or licorice. Great for a full-sun location, and makes a great potted plant since it needs good drainage. You can use it in the kitchen as you would tarragon with chicken, fish, compound butter, etc. And we think it makes the BEST salad dressing.

Sansevieria??

Did you know that Sansevieria sometimes bloom?! This is rare, but we have 1 here at Gill’s right now that’s about to flower. If you’ve never smelled a Sansevieria bloom, be sure to stop by in the next few days. We plan to keep it here until the blooms fade so everyone has a chance to smell the incredible (and incredibly strong) fragrance. If you want to encourage your Sansevieria to bloom, keep the roots constricted in a small pot and give it more light. No guarantees, but it’s magical when it happens.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and we’ve partnered with FIRST FRIDAY, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to breast cancer awareness. This Friday, October 6th through next Thursday, October 12th, when you buy a pink Gerbera Daisy or a pink Kalanchoe at Gill’s, 100% of your purchase is donated to FIRST FRIDAY!

FIRST FRIDAY was formed by a group of Corpus Christi women in 1994 to increase awareness of the importance of early detection and to provide free screening mammograms for those who cannot otherwise afford the care. Such a great cause!

Plant something pink and feel extra good about it!

December is here! These last few weeks of 2023 are sure to fly by. Our advice: make sure you spend some time in the garden to balance out the hectic holiday season. Here are our top to-do’s this month: what to plant, gift ideas, holiday plant care, and more.

Check out our December Garden Guide for more tips and remember that trees, shrubs, and perennials can be planted 12 months out of the year! The only difference is the amount of water they need depending on temperatures and wind!

1. These Plants Want to Be Planted in December

There’s always the BEST time to get plants growing and here’s a few that LOVE this season as much as we do!

Trees…shade, flowering, small, big, they all benefit from planting now. Good root development during the cooler months of winter gives them better growth in spring and a deeper, stronger root system to withstand the summer heat.

Onions…we grow short-day onion varieties here in South Texas. Lucky for us the 1015 Texas Supersweet is one of those along with tasty Texas Early White & Southern Belle Red.

Roses…our mild winters are perfect for big, beautiful roses & the cooler temps will only make them prettier and the flower color richer.

Ornamental Cabbage…these winter classics need to be planted early this month and enjoyed through the season! Easy care, vibrant colors, and unique texture in the garden.

Alyssum…gorgeous white blooms all winter long. Did you know Alyssum flowers and leaves are edible? They have a pungent horseradish-y flavor.

Other plants that require short days…some plants require short days/enough hours of darkness to bloom and look their best. Think Aloes and other outdoor succulents, Camelia, native Salvia greggii, and Kalanchoes!

2. Tips for Holiday Plants

Fresh-cut Christmas Trees…we give all of our trees a fresh cut and get them in water immediately to preserve their freshness. Many customers ask us for another fresh cut before they take the tree home. If you decide to have us do another fresh cut, or if you do it yourself, keep in mind that you have 10 minutes to get the tree in water before that cut seals over! Check water in your tree stand daily and keep it full. If you have pets who like to drink or splash the water, try covering with a piece of foil.

Poinsettias…Think of poinsettias as succulents – because they are! They are a type of euphorbia. That means give them a good drink, but let them dry out between waterings. Also, the leaves bruise and break easily, so avoid touching them as much as possible. So tempting to touch!

Christmas Cactus…Probably the easiest of all holiday plants, and they can last a LONG time! There are stories of Christmas Cacti that have been gifted and passed down through families for 100+ years. They like well-lit areas, but not direct sunlight. Let dry between waterings, then mist the leaves as well as water the soil when its time to water.

Living Holiday Trees…Junipers, Norfolk Pines, Loblolly Pines, Magnolias and Ficus trees all make great Christmas trees that can be planted outside after the holidays. If you bring these in for decorating, be sure they have good bright natural light. Keep watered but not too much, and as soon as the holidays are done…take them outdoors for a breath of fresh air and get them in the ground.

3. Think Gifts for Gardeners!

If you have gardeners on your list this year, we’ve got you covered! Silverware herb markers, handmade ornaments, quality tools and gloves, nature-themed holiday cards, beautiful houseplant cutting jars, and lots more unique garden gifts. And of course, plants!! If they’re picky, you can’t go wrong with a Gill’s gift card!

4. Plant and Feed Winter Flowers

Winter flowers are AMAZING right now! Violas and Pansies are breathtaking and Geraniums are full of buds and blooms. All that blooming makes them hungry, so take a moment and fertilize your beauties. We love using granular Plant Tone once a month, then following up with liquid Hasta Gro every 2 weeks. Both are organic and give you big results. Have that “one more empty pot” to fill?

5. Adjust Your Houseplant Care for Winter

Most houseplants will not experience a complete dormancy period during winter, but they will slow down growth and react to climatic changes like drier conditions inside the house. Give your houseplants more light and less water as temperatures and the amount of daylight hours drop. Dust/shine leaves regularly to ward off insects. Cooler temps = drier conditions and less of the humidity that houseplants love. Try grouping them together to create more humidity, or use a humidifier. When bringing patio plants inside for cold snaps, be sure to treat with All Seasons Horticultural Oil spray to prevent any pests (like scale insects) from hitching a ride indoors.

6. Start Thinking About Frost Prep

We typically don’t get a frost until January or February, but there’s always a chance! Be sure you’ve got your frost blankets or frost cloth ready to protect any tender outdoor tropicals and new plantings. Mulch beds at 2-3″ deep to help seal in warmth. And don’t prune yet! Remember that pruning signals to a plant that it’s time to put on new growth. Instead, plant leaves need to harden off and go dormant for the winter. Foliage that you leave on the plant will help insulate it against cold weather.

Gill’s is here to be your holiday stress antidote! Come take a stroll and pick out a few gifts for the green thumbs on your list. We’ll help you find the right plants, useful tools, nature gifts for kids, holiday cards, and all kinds of other unique and fun gifts to help connect your loved ones to the outdoors. Here’s 12 of our favs.

1. Gifts that Grow

Now is a great time to plant winter flowers like petunias, geraniums, and snapdragons, and they’re quick and easy to plant! Easy for Santa to sneak in and secretly plant a few flowers.

Roses, herbs, and onions are all great to plant right now too. Or if you want to make it a truly memorable holiday, plant a tree! Remember that trees benefit greatly from being planted in fall and winter, including citrus trees! And if you don’t want to do any digging, we’ll plant it for you.

2. Poinsettias and Other Holiday Classics

Poinsettias are THE classic holiday décor and centerpiece for holiday meals. They make great gifts for teachers, bosses, coworkers, and friendly acquaintances – they just make people happy!

A blooming Christmas Cactus or Kalanchoe is great too, or a small living holiday tree like a juniper, Norfolk pine, or rosemary. We can gift wrap these for you. Easy wow!

3. Custom-Planted Pottery

Let us help you put together something totally unique! Choose the pots and plants and we can pot it all up for you. Houseplants, flowers, herbs, native plants for pollinators, and lots more can stand alone or be combined in the right pot.

4. Quality Garden Tools

We don’t carry a huge selection of tools, just nice tools that are made to last. Pruners, loppers, kitchen/herb shears, or even a quality sharp-shooter shovel make great gifts. Working with quality tools makes gardening a lot more fun.

5. Soothing Wind Chimes

Lots of different tones and styles for relaxing in the garden, including our favorite chimes of all time, Music of the Spheres. Hand-made and hand-tuned here in TX.

6. “Gordo” Birdhouses + Bird Baths

These Gordo birdhouses have been a huge hit this fall. People seem to love them and birds too! Pair these with a nice stone bird bath and some bird-attracting plants and you’ll make the birders on your list very happy.

7. Cyanotype Print Kits

Cyanotype photography or printing is a technique that involves laying an object, like a leaf, on paper coated with a solution of iron salts before exposing it to light to create stunning white and blue images. The kit comes with everything you need to make your own prints! Just find the leaves and flowers you want to capture – no darkroom or other tools required!

8. Silverware Herb Markers

These might be our fav garden markers we’ve ever seen. Herb markers etched into old silverware!

9. Rain Chains

Rain chains are THE gift for nature lovers who enjoy the soothing sound of rain. They’re a beautiful alternative to gutter downspouts, guiding rainwater gently into planting beds.

10. Houseplant Cutting Jars

Our cutting jars make great gifts for houseplant lovers. We collect interesting glass jars and use LECA (lightweight expanded clay aggregate) + water as the growing medium for cuttings. We have some ready to go, or all the supplies for you to make your own.

11. Nature-Themed Children’s Books and Holiday Cards

This year, we’re featuring new children’s books and holiday cards by author and illustrator Phoebe Wahl. Her first book, Sonya’s Chickens, was the recipient of the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award, and her most recent book, Little Witch Hazel is an Indie Bestseller. Perfect gifts for a young gardener!

12. When in Doubt – Gift Cards!

Can’t go wrong with a Gill’s gift card! Good for plants or services too. You could give the gift of landscape design, a food garden next Spring, a planted tree, or anything else we provide. We can help you with ideas too!

What a gift running into Joyce Barnette this past Saturday while visiting Gill’s. Joyce has been a weekly visitor of Gill’s since we opened our doors 46 years ago. She and her husband Jim have lived in the Country Club Estates neighborhood since the early 70’s, raising three boys and now blessed with daughter-in-laws and seven grandchildren. Joyce reminds me often how much Jim loves flowers and how much she loves to garden. They make a great team!

Joyce grew up in Mississippi. She credits her mother for her love of gardening. Most days, unless she’s adventuring the world with her sister or other family, she’s out in the garden repotting, planting, trimming, or weeding. Their front yard includes oaks, junipers, hollies, roses, and beautiful ferns on either side of her front door. Instead of pulling the hose up to water, she keeps bottles of water just inside her front door for the ferns. They have a terra cotta stone texture front walk and driveway with a beautiful side yard garden anchored with hill country limestone boulders her sons collected over the years for her. Private seating with pergola, container planting, hanging baskets, and art create a very peaceful outdoor garden space to read and relax! Her back yard has two more seating areas, surrounded by palms, Japanese yew (one of her favorite woody ornamentals), vitex, pittosporums, groundcovers, and flowers. A gardener’s paradise!

Joyce loves putting together hanging baskets, which display beautifully from low lying branches of trees and garden hooks. She doesn’t mind experimenting with plants. She’ll try a plant in one spot and if it isn’t happy, she’ll move it, and hope for better results. She has an extensive succulent garden and she even has a “plant hospital” along the far side of the driveway for plants she’s nursing back to health.

It is always fun to hear what project Joyce is shopping for when at Gill’s. She’s either planting annuals at Jim’s office, landscaping at their church, purchasing gifts to donate to the South Texas Botanical Gardens & Nature Center for a fundraiser, or working in her own garden. Joyce, along with her good friend Mary Hill, have been volunteering their time and resources, keeping the grounds of St. Lukes Methodist Church beautifully landscaped for over 30 years. Joyce has donated many items over the years for the annual Botanical Garden’s Moonlight in the Garden fundraiser, and she and Jim have been sponsoring the 20+ foot fresh Christmas tree that greets families during the holidays at the Botanical Gardens.

The morning I visited with Joyce a hummingbird darted into the garden to gather nectar and then flew right up to us, stopping mid-air as if it knew we were marveling about the beauty and bounty of her garden. I’m so happy to have gotten to know Joyce and am thankful for her kindness and support she generously gives our community!

– Sally Gill

The asps are out! It’s been years since we’ve had a big asp outbreak. These stinging hump back caterpillars love oak trees, yaupons hollies, burford hollies, hawthorns, altheas, and hibiscus. I saw a fresh hatching no bigger than a pea on some hollies the other day. Take a close look at your plants and see if you find any skeletonized leaves. Spray thoroughly on the tops and bottoms of the leaves with Spinosad, or Liquid Sevin as a contact kill. Thuricide can also be used, but the caterpillar has to ingest the leaves to be killed and that takes a couple of days.

Leafcutter bees are also a problem now. These bees are generally passive and not very aggressive. However they can sting and will do so if handled or aggravated. You usually never see the bee, but you do see the damage left behind. They cut perfect semi-circles out of the leaves of soft tissued plants such as crape myrtles, hibiscus, plumbago and roses. We first noticed the damage on our kapok trees. They take the leaves and roll them into perfect tubes to block their nest openings. No treatment is necessary since the nesting period of the female is usually just a couple of weeks. The scalloping of the leaves will not kill your plants, it just leaves them unsightly to some. These bees are great pollinators, so I say, “let them do their thing”.

-DeAnna

No Need To Wait… Plant Hardy Trees And Shrubs Now!

The roots of hardy plants grow during our cool months even though their leaves may be changing color or falling from their branches. This provides a better root system so they thrive in spring and can survive the long, hot summer. Live oaks, magnolia, cedar elm, hawthorns, holly, sage, junipers, roses, just to name a few, are winter hardy and would be appropriate to plant now. Perennials like lantana, turks cap, and ornamental grasses also benefit from planting during the winter months.

Are Your Tropicals Looking Winter Worn?

Hot weather tropicals such as hibiscus, bougainvilleas, esperanza, plumbago and many more suffer from the sudden temperature drops in the winter. Even though we have not had a freeze, the last really good cold snap made our plants look pretty bad. The leaves turn yellow and brown and most plants also suffer lots of leaf drop. This is normal so don’t be alarmed. In late February to early March you should cut all these plants back one third to half their size and fertilize. They will flush out with new spring growth and you will never know they looked so bad over the winter. The beauty of spring!!

Our Thoughts On Winter Watering

Since the temperatures are no longer in the 90’s and plants are not actively growing they require less water. This includes the lawn. Change your watering schedule on the lawn and established shrubs to every 2 weeks slow and deep instead of once a week. Potted plants no longer need to be watered everyday. Most could go every 2-3 days. Night-time dampness and fog helps to keep moisture in the soil. By changing your watering habits you help to reduce fungal problems which are prevalent with these conditions.

TIME TO PRUNE ROSES! Valentine’s Day is a time to remember our loved ones with candy and flowers. It also is the perfect time to prune roses. Late January to mid February is the best time. Prune established hybrid teas, removing dead and small twiggy growth, leaving strong healthy canes to a plant height of 18-24 inches. Try to prune to an outward facing bud to maintain spreading, open growth. Prune shrub roses like Knockouts 1/3 to 1/2 the plant height. Do not prune climbers until after the Spring bloom, then removing only the oldest canes and cutting back healthy, vigorous canes no more than 1/3. Remove spent blooms throughout the season on all rose varieties, cutting back to the first 5 leaflet cluster. You can also begin fertilizing your roses in late February with Bayer Systemic Rose and Flower Care, or organically with Maestro Rose Glo. Gill Landscape Nursery stocks disease resistant roses (ask for them), but if you have hybrid teas, as soon as new growth appears you should begin a spray program to control insects and diseases. Bayer 3 in 1 Insect, Disease and Mite Control, takes care of all rose problems. For organic controls, use Neem Oil for insects and disease or Serenade to control diseases. A regular spray program keeps your roses healthy and happy. Remember fungal diseases are always easier to prevent than to cure.

Crab Grass? Probably not, King Ranch Bluestem is more likely the ugly ogre in your lawn. KR Bluestem was imported as a forage grass from Africa a long time ago by guess who? It is very tough, grows with hardly any rainfall, but can spoil the look of your nice lawn. There is no selective herbicide to remove it without harming the desirable lawn grass mixed with it, so you either dig (not easy or thorough) or apply RoundUp. Since the RoundUp will kill everything you spray it on, limit your spray by knocking out the bottom of a small box and placing the box on top of each bluestem clump. Inside the box, spray to wet foliage, not to soak the ground, do not mow for 4 days before or after spraying. Your St. Augustine will be free to run across and cover these limited dead spots within a period of a few weeks, if done in March or April after fertilizing.

Venus Fly Trap

“The infamous Venus Fly Trap! It’s one of the coolest plants we get in, and is surprisingly easy to take care of. Simply pot the plant in sphagnum peat moss, and put the pot in a saucer full of charcoal. Then water the plant by putting water in the saucer and letting it suck it up. The charcoal in the saucer keeps the water fresh, and since they’re naturally a bog

plant, they love to be standing in water. Venus fly trapslove sunny windowsills, but don’t let them get too hot! I feed mine pill bugs since mine live inside, but if you put them outside they’ll catch their own dinner. I even had a 2 year venus fly trap that caught a wasp; I was so proud!!”

-Marta