As you find ways to keep cool during the triple digit heat, we have tips to help your plants beat the heat during this heat wave and in the coming summer months.

Fall is a great time to collect seeds for sowing in Northern California's Central Valley. Freshly collected seed often has a particularly high viability. Find tips for collecting seeds from milkweed, buckwheats, yarrow and coyote mint.

Gardening tips from Nursery Manager Taylor Lewis to make sure your new plants from our nursery get off to a healthy start. 

It’s true that summer is not the best time of the year to install new plants, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t. Watch the latest Ask the Garden Gnomes video below for advice or scroll down to find some quick tips.

By Taylor Lewis, nursery manager

Hello again! Back in January, 2020 while doing some winter cleanup for a client, the question arose of what to do with a huge, happy Salvia ‘Pozo Blue’. Can it be pruned? How far back? Do it in stages to avoid shocking the plant? Just deadhead spent blooms?

While passing the catmint, I can see it’s time for a haircut. They’re looking rather winter haggard wearing a grayish-brown coat from last years fall line. Nepeta x faassenii, better known as a Catmint, is one of my favorites groundcovers. You can cut this cat back anytime of the year, as hard as you want and as often as you want.

If it’s January in the Valley and you’ve got a Salvia leucantha (Mexican bush sage) planted in your yard, there’s a good chance it looks very much like this one. I promise you they appreciate a hard cut in the winter.

Fall is a wonderful time to enjoy Salvia greggii and microphylla. Most of the questions I get asked about Salvia are in regards to pruning.

By Taylor Lewis, nursery manager

Months of color, drought-tolerant, Valley-appropriate, fast-growing, easy-care — these traits are a few reasons that crape myrtles (Lagerstroemia indica), and their many cultivars, have become one of the most widely used home landscape, commercial, parking lot, median strip, landscape trees in the Sacramento Valley. So, what’s the mystery?

Taylor Lewis, nursery manager of the Arboretum Teaching Nursery, walks us through the process of giving his Chinese fringe flower a haircut.