I don’t know why my friends say that I hate change. In a single decade I went from disdaining dahlias to wanting a border full of colorful specimens. I grew dahlias this year with that aim in mind. I was egged on by gorgeous garden magazines spreads featuring gardeners who are able to grow armloads … Read more
By any measure, Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ is a citizen of the world. Descended from several Chinese species and long cultivated in Japan, the plant’s parent was hybridized in England. That English hybrid found its way to France and, once established in the French garden of a man named Jobert, produced a white-flowered sport, or spontaneous … Read more
The scenario goes something like this…A child wants a dog. All his friends have dogs and he is the only one without a dog. The child’s busy parents, wary of another long term commitment won’t agree to get a dog. The child chips away at the parents’ resistance until they finally give in—as long as … 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
