It stood starkly on a red clay hill, with an odd roofline resulting from upstairs rooms that weren’t aligned with those downstairs.

It was the first completed house on our block, though the frame of another across the street had been abandoned by builders some time earlier. It was later completed.

The strange roofline (the builders insisted the house was sitting backwards on the lot) is yet extant, though camouflaged somewhat by trees that have, at last, reached above the eaves.

The red clay hillside has been turned, at least in spots, into a fertile loam hillside, but only by the sweat of the brow. If sweat equity meant anything, we could sell out for millions.

As it is, I am sure that whoever succeeds us will promptly bulldoze the highly labor-intensive rock gardens, perennial borders, pools and parterres and revert the whole thing back to lawn.

For now, however, such distressing thoughts must be pushed aside, to the extent the emotions and mind will allow. The mission is to plow on, with occasional reports from there to you via these lines or a personal visit on your part. You are welcome.

A reader here in Tennessee writes of total disgust and frustration resulting from sale of non-hardy plants by merchants. The point is well taken.

Recent mild winters (save for a few momentary exceptions) have coaxed southern shrubs further and further north. The next 1970s-type winter that comes along is going to take a staggering toll of them.

However, there are plants being offered as we speak that won’t even take a normal Zone 6 winter, much less the occasional Zone 5 aberration that we occasionally see. Anything planted here should be able to take flat-out zero with considerable wind, or 10 to 15 below in calm air. Northern Illinois gardeners need shrubs and trees that will withstand –30 to –35 degress.

I could name a number of commonly sold and planted shrubs that won’t even take 15 above, much less zero or lower. Widely offered in recent years have been loropetalums, particularly the pinkish-purple ones. They are barely hardy in Zone 7 and even a mild winter here will get them.

Another good example is Indian hawthorn, Raphiolepis Indica, with dainty pale pink blooms and excellent glossy, evergreen leaves. Evergreen, that is in zone 8 and maybe 7. It’s everbrown here, after the first winter. Cleyera japonica, likewise, though it might stand one of our milder winters, that is, it could last a couple of years, if you’re lucky. In northern Illinois I’ve seen boxwoods and some tender Japanese Maples offered for sale that will not survive even a mild northern Illinois winter.

Don’t expect all landscape designers and architects to know plants. Often they don’t. I recently was asked to review plans for an institutional planting here that were done by a prominent Memphis firm. It included all sorts of things that would have been gone in the twinkling of a frosted eye. The architect had an excellent plan, but with some wrong plants.

It behooves plant merchants to research and know the limits of what they sell. Discount stores are particularly guilty of knowing virtually nothing, despite their claims to the contrary. Even some nurseries are guilty of steering people wrong on suitable landscape plants for our area.

From Poor Willie’s Almanack—If you don’t know diamonds, know your dealer. If you don’t know plants, know your dealer.