By MAUREEN GILMER, Scripps Howard News Service

"Only in America do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage."

They call it a "torture test" when extreme weather descends, as it has this past year in Texas. While many lament such difficulties, one rose grower claims that this anomaly of high temperatures separates the men from the boys in test plots.

Tomatoes that ripen all at once on a perfectly sized bush aid in mechanized harvesting, but that's a very short season for fresh picking. Tomatoes that keep a long time in cold storage also please commercial farmers, but we all know what those taste like.

I grew up in NASA's Apollo years (1961-72), when space-age technology yielded such essentials as memory foam, smoke detectors and water filters. The agency helped fine-tune other products, such as cordless tools for Black and Decker, to make them better suited to space.

New Jersey was devastated by 19th-century iron mining. The land was dredged and drained to create more ground for expanding an iron furnace. The result was an environmental catastrophe that left the swampy land nearly worthless and too poor to support crops.

High in the mountains of Europe, conditions are typical for succulent plants: lean, gravelly soils, wind, intense sunlight and long periods without rainfall. In this trying environment, where winter sees some of the best ski slopes in the Alps, a group of succulents evolved to take it all in stride.

When you shop from catalogs it's easy to just click and buy. But when it comes to seed catalogs, there's a lot more to the process of picking out what vegetables you want to grow next year. That's why I require a yellow highlighter, Post Its and a tablet for sketches and notes. You must literally think like a designer. The reason is simple: crop rotation.

It pays to plan ahead. This was painfully evident last year when I discovered retailers pricing 1-gallon potted organic tomatoes at more than $7 apiece in June. The small-budget gardener in me knew that same plant could be grown from seed for pennies. But retailers know that many of us fail to plan ahead, and the result is we are forced to pay more.

I appreciate orchids most in winter, when large spray of bright flowers chases away the doldrums. They make such wonderful holiday gifts because their blooms last for weeks, sometimes even months. Orchids add festive color in lieu of short-lived poinsettias.

Winter is the season for camellias in the Deep South and the far West where older home sites and parks burst into color at the most unlikely time of year. For those who have houses with existing camellias, or if you are thinking of adding these shrubs to shady gardens, there are some basics to learn first.