11.   A. Like some great entertainer, flowering quince puts it all on the line for spring visitors to nurseries and garden centers and then collapses backstage after the show.

12.   Add more soil, preferably a sterile mix from a garden center.

13.   After decades of low-priced predictability, and of being upstaged by pricey perennials, annuals have suddenly become the most glamorous things at the garden center.

14.   All these reliable performers are available in garden centers or mail order catalogs.

15.   But garden centers also carry some good, common blue annuals.

16.   But Ms. Killough, who works at a local nursery, said it was hard to imagine that the Internet could ever replace a trip to the garden center.

17.   But there is an alternative to the ubiquitous evergreen azalea, the foil-wrapped kind found in containers in garden centers and supermarkets.

18.   Buy a new shovel handle at a home or garden center.

19.   Buy a soil-testing kit at a garden center, and check the pH to make sure the soil is neutral, adding lime if it is acidic.

20.   Cannas grow from fleshy roots, which are available by mail order or in garden centers in the spring.