Anyone who was in Birmingham in January 2014 remembers what a little snow and ice can do to a city that isn’t set up for it. That month, overnight lows at the airport stayed at or below freezing for 17 straight nights, one of the longest cold stretches in the National Weather Service’s records for […]

Birmingham doesn’t get much snow, but it does get ice, and ice is harder on trees. Freezing rain coats every twig and branch, and across a large canopy that added weight builds up fast. Limbs that held up fine all summer can snap overnight. Add saturated winter soil and a little wind, and whole trees

Birmingham doesn’t have a dry season. The metro averages well over 50 inches of rain a year, and close to 15 of those typically fall in December, January, and February alone. What changes in winter isn’t the rain. It’s what happens to the water after it lands. In July, a low spot in the yard

Most people don’t think about Christmas lights until the turkey’s put away. By then, the companies that hang them have a calendar that’s mostly full. This year, Steven’s Wack-N-Sack is offering professional holiday lighting for homes and businesses across the Birmingham area. If you want lights up this season without spending a Saturday on a

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.

Most of the plants we feature earn their spot with flowers. American beautyberry earns it with fruit. Right now, along woodland edges and fence lines across Central Alabama, this native shrub is producing tight clusters of berries in a purple so saturated it looks artificial the first time you see it. The blooms in early summer are small and easy to miss. The berries are the whole point, and they arrive in late August and hold through September and October, right when most of the landscape is winding down.

August is when the damage from a Birmingham summer becomes hard to ignore. Areas that were full and green in May are thin. Bare spots have opened up along walkways and in the middle of the yard. The lawn generally looks tired and a good rain hasn’t fixed.