Apples 

Apple trees are among the easiest fruit-bearing trees to grow in Missouri! Adaptable and hardy, apple trees produce best in full-sun and with proper care can produce fruit for 25 years or more with yields ranging from five to ten bushels of fruit per mature tree. Please note that to grow this fruit successfully, you’ll need more than one tree for proper pollination.

Having several cultivars with the same flowering times works best, as harvest seasons can range from early to late summer and fall depending on the type. 

Jo Batzer paints with plants. She draws with driftwood and sketches with saplings.  One look at her garden and you see she is an artist.  Colors, textures and shapes flow together and then play off each other.

Step down into Debbie Hadley’s Webster Groves garden and be engulfed in green: the dark forest green of the towering Norway spruce, the Canadian hemlock and feathery false cypress that form the perimeter of property. Spotted throughout to provide winter interest and architectural form, deep green spreading yews, blue tinged spruces and Weeping Blue Atlas cedar add nuances to the verdant theme.

It is a huge leap over land and sea from a tiny garden plot in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, to a .4 acre, waterfall-accented landscape in University City. Christine Mackey-Ross has done that with such agility and water wings that the Missouri Botanical Garden selected her welcoming, color-accented front yard and serene, architectural back yard to be displayed as part of the organization’s 2020 garden tour. It is a gardening achievement she calls “above and beyond.”

The first time they walked through the front door of the Webster Groves home they have now lived in for 14 years, Linda and Allen knew it was the right house. They looked to their left and immediately saw a sitting room with French doors to a patio. Directly ahead, looking through the house, a wall of windows provided a more expansive view of the extensive patio and framed the mature garden beyond.

The homeowner’s driving directions could not be more simple. To discover Top of the Hill Farm, you just keep going. Down the one-lane road, past every turn-off. When you can go no farther, you have arrived.