Arboretum offers free gardening tips, advice from experts

Educational tours of the Arboretum’s Longenecker Gardens will be held beginning Wednesday, April 23, and running through June 18.

Tours begin at 7 p.m., and are free and open to gardeners or anyone interested in woody ornamentals. They are not intended for children. Tours will start near the parking lot at the Arboretum Visitor Center, accessible from either side of the Arboretum, and run as long as daylight and interest allow.

While every effort will be made to keep to this schedule, information about schedule changes will be available during office hours at the Arboretum’s reception desk at 263-7888.

This is an excellent opportunity to obtain advice on what kind of lilac or crabapple to plant, how to grow azaleas and rhododendrons in southern Wisconsin, and which native trees or shrubs to put into a native setting — and much more.

Each tour is conducted by noted area horticulturists who point out plants in their fields of expertise, as well as some of the unusual plants in the collections, which might be in bloom.

With more than 2,000 plants on display, Longenecker Gardens offers an excellent collection of trees, shrubs and vines in Wisconsin. Plantings were begun when the Arboretum was founded in 1934.

Early bloomers
On April 23, Bill Hoch, graduate student in horticulture who has taught the landscape plants course, will look at early blooming trees and shrubs such as: serviceberries, forsythias and possibly magnolias.