HEFLIN — If it grows out of the dirt in Cleburne County, Melanie Taylor Spaulding knows about it or wants to know about it.

Over the past months we have been exploring the color wheel to get our creative juices flowing. We are creating the perfect landscape using the tool of the color wheel to help the gardener (or the artist) design with color.

In recent months, The Southern Gardener has been exploring the enormous role of color on our cultures, our personal lives and especially our gardens.

We can use the color purple in foliage and flowers. Either way, we add a touch of drama to our gardens.

Adding color is an engaging experience as the gardener plays with contrasting and harmonious hues (and everything in between).

It was a Monday afternoon. Anja McCastle was putting the finishing touches on a yearlong remodel of her Jacksonville home. She had done much of the work herself.

Spring is a dress rehearsal for summer.

It seems like yesterday and also like decades ago that my husband, the dog, and I huddled in a tiny closet with cell phone, bike helmets (except for the dog) while a war raged around my home of 48 years. There is no way to describe the terror of the hour once my cell phone jangled “take cove…

It seems like yesterday and also like decades ago that my husband, the dog and I huddled in a tiny closet with a cell phone and bike helmets (except for the dog) while a war raged around our home of 48 years.

A gizmo called the Gardener’s Color Wheel is a fine way to create a perfect palette of colors in the garden. 

Gardeners are individualists. Our tastes, our time, our budgets and our gardening spaces differ.

A practically non-existent fall and spring, terrible cold and heat, too much or too little rain and, of course, the big bad tornado.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The gardeners know exactly where to go: outside.

The restaurant owner is living like it’s the 19th century — but with air-conditioning. 

Many gardeners have completely shunned annuals in favor of perennials. Too much money to replace them every year!

Someone referred to me as “the gardener.”

The calendar officially marked the first day of summer as June 21. It seems summer’s heat arrived much earlier than its official beginning. Spring seemed practically non-existent this year.

Since the big wind came through my neighborhood on March 19, residents of the Avenues (the northeast) and the northwest sides of Jacksonville are working toward a new normal. It will be a long trip to that normal, full of bumps, detours, tears and frustration. With patience, fortitude and ti…

In the first ugly days after the March tornado ravaged “The Avenues,” my neighborhood on the northeast side of Jacksonville, I believed life would never be the same. I doubted that anything could be normal, including me.

In Elvira Snider’s yard in the Hollingsworth Community near Jacksonville, the large purple azalea is over 8 feet tall.

Joy Patty sent in these photos of her pug, Frankie, in the peonies, as well as her large snowball bush.

Since the tornado blasted through my neighborhood in northeast Jacksonville, I can barely recognize the streets I have called home for 47 years.