May 2026

Few plants carry as much nostalgia in the South as the gardenia. The fragrance alone is enough to stop you in your tracks, and when they’re blooming in May and June, you can often smell them before you see them. Across Birmingham, Hoover, Vestavia Hills, and Homewood, gardenias have been a fixture in residential landscapes for decades. They reward you with some of the most beautiful blooms in any Southern garden, but they do ask for a little more attention than some of the lower-maintenance plants we’ve featured in previous months.

Most commercial property managers in the Birmingham metro put their attention on the entrance, the main lawn areas, and the building frontage. Those are the areas that get noticed first, and rightfully so. But there’s a category of landscape space that tends to fall off the maintenance radar until it’s visibly overgrown or deteriorated: parking

You’ve done everything right this spring. The cut down went well, the lawn greened up on schedule, fertilization happened at the right time, and mowing has been consistent. Then one morning you walk outside and notice a large, roughly circular patch of brown, dead-looking grass that wasn’t there a few days ago. That’s brown patch.

If your landscape beds are looking a little sparse after the pansies faded and the spring shrubs finished blooming, now is the time to add summer color. Late May through early June is the ideal window for planting summer annuals in the Birmingham metro. The soil is warm, the threat of cool nights has passed,