Engelbreit's book offers words for gardeners

Engelbreit's book offerswords for gardeners
"Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature," garden writer and designer Penelope Hobhouse once observed.
So is illustrator Mary Engelbreit's new book, "Words for Gardeners to Live By."
Engelbreit has collected quotations about flowers, gardens and nature and illustrated them in her cheerful, child-centered style. The book, the fifth in her "Words to Live By" series, is a celebration of the natural world around us, the kind of book you can pick up when you need a few words of inspiration.
"Words for Gardeners to Live By" is published by Andrews McMeel Publishing and is priced at $12.95.
Messenger can helpboost plants' resistance
Science has come up with a new way of making flowering plants stronger and healthier.
Washington company EDEN Bioscience recently introduced a product called Messenger that's based on a naturally occurring protein, harpin. It's sort of like a broad-spectrum vaccine for plants, triggering an immune response similar to the kind that helps people fight off disease.
The protein acts like a plant pathogen, stimulating a plant to rev up its nutrient uptake, photosynthesis, vigor and reproductive activity. Those defenses make the plant resistant to a lot of diseases.
The spray-on product is available from the American Rose Society at www.ars.org (click on "Shop Online," then "Rose Mall") or (800) 637-6534, and from EDEN Bioscience at www.edenbio.com or (888) 522-5976.
Salt, other factorshelped kill trees in Ohio
Q. I've noticed a considerable number of dead fir and pine trees along the roads, particularly on the turnpike between Brecksville and Strongsville and on Stow Road through Hudson, Ohio. There must be thousands of trees in this area that are dead. What happened?
A. A combination of factors ravaged roadside trees, said Alan Siewert, regional urban forester for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Forestry. The overwhelming contributor was salt spray from the roads, which dried out the trees. Because last winter was so snowy, road crews spread much more salt than usual, and that exacerbated the problem.
Many of the trees already were stressed by last year's exceptionally dry summer, Siewert said. Then the dry April delivered another blow, when trees were denied sufficient water just when their roots were starting to function.
White pines, which are extremely salt-sensitive, were hit hard, but "even our salt-tolerant trees are taking it on the chin," he said.