Right now, you can hardly navigate through the garden centers, big box stores and grocery floral sections due to the avalanche of orchids. Most are moth orchids or Phalaenopsis, which are relatively easy to grow indoors and, thanks to tissue culture, incredibly cheap to produce. If they make your heart sing during the dark months, … Read more
A few years I bought a fall-blooming camellia that was supposedly cold hardy. I planted, tended and fussed over it because I wanted the beautiful rose-like flowers to light up my garden in the late fall. It obliged me by surviving exactly one year. Failure doesn’t usually faze me, but for some reason I did … Read more
Some things in this life never change. Take writing and book publishing for example. Author and artist Titian Peale—1799-1885—worked on his book, The Butterflies of North America, beginning with a prospectus in 1833. When he died, fifty two years later, the book was still unfinished and Peale had no commitment from a publisher. In 1916, … Read more
You can tell a lot about a culture by the word its citizens use to describe the insect we call “butterfly”. German butterflies have such a weighty-sounding name–“schmetterling”—that it’s a wonder they manage to take to the air. The French and Italians allow their butterflies to float along as “papillon” or “farfalla”. Spaniards delight in … Read more
Friends often ask me to identify mystery plants and those identification attempts sometimes lead me on voyages of discovery. Not long ago I took one of those trips. My friend asked me to look at a mystery tree growing only about two blocks from my house. I had only a few available minutes, but I … Read more
