I used to mope over the advance of fall, lamenting the loss of my beloved garden flowers, morosely plucking the last roses, and generally carrying on as if horticultural Armageddon was just around the corner. I felt as if the Grim Reaper had stepped away from the neighbors’ lavish Halloween display to walk hand in … Read more
We have just passed the autumn equinox, which marks the official end of summer and the start of fall. We are also halfway to the winter solstice, which is the shortest and therefore darkest day of the year. Many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere celebrate the harvest around the time of the autumn equinox. In … Read more
The countryside around my family’s summer cottage in Central New York State is studded with former farm sites. Sometimes buildings or their dilapidated remains are evident on the overgrown lots that were once the hubs of working family farms. More often, all that remains are the horticultural memories of those farms—garden plants once tended by … Read more
This year, some parts of the United States—and elsewhere in the world—were besieged by wildfires of historic proportions. In my part of the world we have been drowning in an abundance of rain, culminating last week in devastating flooding as the end of a hurricane roared through. It made me wish that we could somehow … Read more
If you aim to strike fear into a rose breeder’s heart, all you need are three little words—“rose rosette disease.” Rose rosette disease is an insidious rose killer. Spread by microscopic eriophyid mites, the virus affects only roses. There is no cure and it is almost invariably fatal. To make matters worse, no rose species … Read more
