Yearning for Late Winter Flowers

One of my favorite bedding plants is called 'Candytuft' (Iberis). Two of the most common varieties are 'Snowflake' and 'Purity'. It is a low growing, evergreen shrub with bright white flowers from late Winter to Summer. It can reseed, so I recommend shearing off the spent flowers in the Fall. However, it hasn't been invasive in my Zone 14 yard.

The particulars:

Full Sun to Part Shade

Regular Water

Sunset Zones 1-24

Snowflake is 4-12 inches tall and 1.5 to 3 feet wide. It has broader, more leathery leaves; larger flowers in larger clusters on shorter stems.

Purity is 6-12 inches tall as well as wide. It's more compact than Snowflake.

Save your money and skip the 1 gallon cans -- the 4" pots establish themselves really quickly and are half the price. They should be appearing at your local nursery right now.

Got Scale?

To me, one of the summer's peskiest pests is scale. This insect has many different varieties which seem to attack many different species of plants. One plant in my Northern California yard that seems to have a perennial problem with scale are my Birch trees (Betula; B. pendula).

Scale will produce a sticky substance called "honeydew" when they feed on your plants, which in turn invite ants and sooty mold into your garden. While I don't necessarily have a problem with ants in the ground, I draw the line at having them crawl all over my trees. Nature provides lady bugs and parasitic wasps to help take care of the problem, but sometime the scale population becomes overwhelming. However, now's the time for you to provide a little extra help.

Horticultural oils are an effective way to control certain pests in your yard. They are less harmful to the beneficial bugs in your yard then a traditional pesticide. And they work well on the more stationary pests such as scale. The best time to use horticultural oil against scale is right when the baby scale hatches and begin to craw up the tree. At this time their shells are soft and the oil will do a good job in suffocating them. You can apply tape to the tree to try and catch the scale to see if it's active, or you can use 'bud break' as a sign as it's time to spray. I use 'bud break'.


I just noticed that one of my birch trees is just starting to leaf out. It's in the 'bud break' stage and now's the perfect time to use a relatively safe method to control the outbreak of scale. I've attached a picture of what 'bud break' looks like.

You can find a horticultural oil in any home and garden center. Make sure you read the label so that you get the one that kills scale AND make sure you follow all the application rules. The adage of "If a little is good, then a lot is better" DOES NOT apply to using any type of pesticides.