Some pricing information, business strategy and how to use your extra leaf blowers to make high art. Have a great weekend.

• Find out what customers will pay.
• How to say no.
• Terrible social media advice. (via Chris Heiler)
• Sometimes you have to disappear to run your business better.
• The mother of all terraria.
• Above: Leaf blower portraits.

Here’s our weekly digest of cool stuff we found online. Enjoy!

• New invasive plant database for the Midwest.
• Get a taste of Giverny in NYC.
• A new perspective on worker injuries. (via @ValleyCrest)
• Plants that smell you.
• Phoenix housing market rises like a … well.
• Above: Denver-based Swingle Lawn & Tree Care does a great job of producing how-to videos for its customers.

One of the perks of being the editor of a landscaping magazine (and there are a few) are the annual shipments of flowers that show up at our offices every spring. They come from all over the country, from all sorts of companies, and are a sure sign that we’ve officially put winter behind us.

My colleagues at Greenhouse Management and Garden Center tend to get even more material in the mail, and they’ve taken to sprucing up our offices with the fledgling plants – and they’re even building a vertical vegetable garden out on the balcony.

Today’s batch came from our friends at Proven Winners partner EuroAmerican Propagators. They’re based in Bonsall, Calif., and I interviewed their CEO and founder last year on the beach in San Diego. (Told you there were a few perks.)

Stay tuned through the summer and fall for updates on how these annuals and perennials stand up to the heat and the dozens of deer that live in my back woods. You can’t see them in this photo, but they’re just out of frame, licking their lips.

Here’s our weekly update on cool stuff from the web. Enjoy!

• A farm replaces golf as in the suburbs. (Via @turfhugger)
• Monkshood making a comeback in the Midwest.
• A visual representation of what Americans spend their money on.
• Top 5 social media branding mistakes.
• ASLA publishes report how much cash green roofs and similar infrastructure can save.
• Make your designers’ lives easier with Pinterest. (via @uphelpsr)
• Flower subscription service H.Bloom raises $10 million. (via @getsocialshow)
• Above: Landscape lighting series by Barry Underwood, an artist and professor of photography at the Cleveland Art Institute. (via The Dirt)



Lawn & Landscape is putting together a series of special reports on the best plant material for contractors in the installation business, and we need your help.

Please take 10 minutes and answer a few short questions about what plants you buy, when you buy them and what challenges you’re facing in the installation business.

You can find the survey here: http://svy.mk/blogplantsurvey.

Thanks, and good luck!

http://svy.mk/plantsurvey

Our United States are home to the highest concentration of an extremely rare plant: a vampire albino redwood.

These vampires remain attached to the roots of their healthy, normal, parent trees (coastal redwoods can reproduce asexually by sprouting new shoots from roots or stumps), and survive by sucking energy from them. They can keep this up for a century.

According to Discover, only about 25 of these trees are known to exist, and eight of them are in a state park in California. Since they lack any chlorophyll, they can’t synthesize light to create energy, so they suck life out of normal, healthy plants.