Crabapple LandscapEXPERTS, Creating Outstanding Environments

10/17/2026

Silly Saturday: Vegetable personalities!

10/16/2026

In Autumn, Dahlias are the glory of the landscape

10/15/2026

The fragrance of fall-blooming Tea Olive (Osmanthus fragrans) fills golf course, courtyard, or landscape. Tiny flowers smell super sweet

10/13/2026

October is the time for garden Asters to shine

10/12/2026

October is a great time for Core Aeration. Ask your Crabapple Rep https://crabapple.com/top-10-benefits-of-core-aeration-to-lawns/

10/11/2026

Plumleaf Azalea

🌺 In the summer of 1930 a Georgia mill owner stopped his car in Harris County for something that should not have existed.

It was July. Azaleas do not bloom in July. Every azalea in the South is finished by May. But in a shaded ravine near Blue Springs, outside the little town of Hamilton, a wild shrub stood covered in flowers the color of a hot coal.

The man was Cason Callaway of Callaway Mills. The plant was Rhododendron prunifolium, the plumleaf azalea, and it grows wild in only one place on earth, a pocket of ravines within about a hundred miles of Pine Mountain, Georgia. Not Alabama. Not the Carolinas. Nowhere outside that small circle of red clay and spring fed creeks.

It is the latest blooming azalea there is, holding its flowers through July and August when the woods have gone quiet and nothing else is showing color. Deep shade and cool ravine air are the whole trick.

Callaway could not let it go. He started buying up worn out cotton land around Pine Mountain and planting it back, acre after acre, and on May 21, 1952 he opened the place to the public as Ida Cason Gardens. Everyone knows it now as Callaway Gardens. His wife Virginia, the botanist of the pair, spent years making sure the plumleaf would not disappear along with its ravines.

A whole garden, because one man pulled over for a flower nobody else had noticed.

What grows around your part of Georgia that you have never seen anywhere else?

Photo: Shuvaev, CC BY-SA 4.0

10/10/2026

Silly Saturday: Joe Cool Pads Opuntia and Love Grass hair

10/08/2026

Crabapple’s Harvest Queen is ready for Alpharetta’s Scarecrow Invasion. This is one of our favorite community events and love being a part of it every year! Awesome Alpharetta, Georgia City of Alpharetta GA

10/05/2026

Darling and useful, the Green Anole eats small flying insects and spiders. Is this your spirit animal? It represents adaptability, personal transformation, emotional healing, and renewal

10/04/2026

Silly Saturday: contrasting leaf forms. Larches planted in a smiley face among Douglas Firs