At this time of the year we celebrate spring by rushing out to the garden centers and buying flats of pansies and violas. We breathe the warming air and fill up our window boxes, pots and borders with these spring avatars. And then we turn around and try to exterminate their cousins, the common violets, … Read more
Plant craziness has attacked me again. As always, it came on suddenly, as I sat down after a long day’s work and paged through one of my favorite English gardening magazines. These publications are full of what my husband called “plant pornography”—gorgeous photos of alluring specimens, dripping with dew and ready to jump right off … Read more
The selling of souls is serious business; just ask the poets and playwrights who have explored that theme over the centuries. Gardeners generally have little time for such existential considerations, because they are busy weeding, watering and doing other garden chores. But every once in awhile, a plant comes along that is so alluring, it … Read more
Not all of us are adept at garden design and only some of us can afford professional help. What can we do to get beauty in our landscapes at a cost that still allows us to buy plants? Of course there are numerous internet sites, software programs, and other web-based means of finding garden plans … Read more
Winter has temporarily abated, with temperatures consistently above freezing and even jumping into spring-like territory. The weekend looks promising. It is past time for me to prune the flowering quince. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it would be, except for one small detail—the flowering quince, or Chaenomeles speciosa, is armed … Read more
