By MAUREEN GILMER, DIY Network

Crystal asked me what's wrong with the roses at her new home. It's a wonderful old place with extensive gardens where two plants have her baffled. The roses aren't blooming, she says, and they don't make hips, either. She wondered if perhaps they had grown too old to bloom, and should she replace them.

Alice May Brock, who inspired Arlo Guthrie's famous '60s song, "Alice's Restaurant," knew that flavor is key to culinary culture: "Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good."

The quiet peace of Buddhism has inspired many to seek a more contemplative life. There is no better way to find this deep sense of harmony than in the garden. Landscapes created in the Far East have evolved to reflect the basics of this spiritual path. They take various forms, from the complex Japanese tea garden to the minimal gravel field of Zenlike spaces.

Flowering plants first appeared just 130 million years ago, which is modern history in evolutionary terms. For 300 years before the first flower, its predecessors were evolving from the most primitive single celled algae to complex land plants. Oddly enough, many of these primitive fellows are still alive and well today. We're just not tuned into them because they lack color flowers.

Tulip planting is impossibly bipolar. It's split between spring and fall making the span between ordering, planting and flowering at least seven months apart. What inspires us in early spring as these magnificent plants bloom is often a faded memory by the time fall bulb planting season rolls around.

The sound of tires on gravel always brings to mind English manor houses on "Masterpiece Theater." You expect a Rolls Royce to deliver over-dressed nobility into the hands of waiting domestic staff. And in Jane Austen novels, young ladies in their elaborate Victorian dress stroll along gravel lined flowerbeds.

It's hotly debated whether the fierce Carib Indians of the Island of Guadalupe were cannibals. So named "Canibales" by the Spanish to describe their ferocious defense against the invaders, it is more likely that this tribe was mislabeled.

I have finally come to terms with my obsessive-compulsive personality. Call it a one-track mind, tunnel vision or maybe it's just a drive that's all out of proportion with reality. Whatever it is, the Select Seeds catalog reached out and snagged my OCD brain big time.

Everyone loves a butterfly but few are as enchanted with the lowly moth. Yet these muted insects lost in the shadows may have more smarts. Eons ago they quit the daytime and found it safer to chase flowers after dark.

Isaiah lives with his grandmother in an apartment next to the stables where 50 horses are boarded year around. He's an inner city kid like so many others with a broken family and few African American role models outside sports figures. Happy and gregarious, he made friends with a senior couple who keep their two Arabian horses at the stables.