September 2026

For about eleven months of the year, muhly grass is a perfectly nice green mound that nobody looks at twice. Then late September arrives and it throws up a haze of pink flower stalks so fine and so dense that the whole plant looks like colored smoke. If you’ve driven past a commercial property or […]

Every fall we get calls from homeowners across Birmingham who have spotted something in a tree and want to know how bad it is. Usually it’s a silk nest wrapped around the end of a branch, and usually the answer is that it looks worse than it is. But not always. Three different pests get

Fall brings more traffic across commercial properties in the Birmingham area than any other season except the weeks before Christmas. Football Saturdays fill parking lots. Schools and churches run homecoming and fall festivals. Retail centers ramp toward the holidays. Multi-family properties hit a leasing push. Office buildings host year-end client visits and open houses. More people on the property means more people forming an opinion about how it’s maintained. The properties that come through fall looking sharp are the ones where somebody built a calendar in September and worked backward from it.

Garden centers are busiest in April. Everybody buys plants in spring, gets them in the ground over a weekend, and feels good about it. Then July arrives, those plants have a root system the size of the pot they came in, and half of them are struggling. Fall is the better window in Central Alabama, and it isn’t close. Trees and shrubs planted from October through early spring go into their first summer with an established root system instead of trying to build one while the temperature is over 95.