It is exactly one week until my garden must look its best for the charity garden tour. After a washout over the long weekend when I had planned to move the planting scheme towards perfection, speed gardening has become the order of each day. Speed gardening means moving fast, focusing on the most visible parts … Read more
Inspiration comes at the strangest times and in the most unlikely places. The other day I was walking in a neighboring town, doing what I always do—looking at other people’s landscaping, envying some of the results, and imaging what I would do with less inspiring properties. This practice is highly satisfactory because it exercises my … Read more
I fall in love with some plants easily. Others take longer—sometimes a lot longer. That was the case with Stachys byzantina, known to its friends as lambs’ ears. It is not as if lambs’ ears wasn’t on my radar. When my daughter was small, she saw a bed of the plants, touched their soft, fuzzy … Read more
It is almost axiomatic that children tend to rebel in some way against their parents. The offspring of nonconformists buy houses in the suburbs and fret about their perfect lawns. Children of traditionalists pursue alternative lifestyles in ways guaranteed to alarm their parents. I rebelled with geraniums—specifically hardy geraniums. I came from a family that … Read more
The plants that botanists sometimes call “spring ephemerals,” including trilliums, common violets and hepaticas, always seem magical to me. They push up through bare earth when warmer weather is still a vague suggestion, and proceed to flower, set seed and disappear, all in manner of a few months. Intellectually I know that ephemerals are always … Read more
