In Western New York, where I grew up, we did not put away our winter clothes until Memorial Day. Now I live in a gentler climate and when the “official” first day of spring arrives, I expect the garden to be well on its way to mid and late spring glory. We have had a … Read more
‘Orange Glow’ is up and glowing, even though “up” is a relative term for a plant that is only a few inches tall. Though it has the same name as a popular cleaning product, ‘Orange Glow’ is in fact a winter aconite, a type of buttercup, belonging to the same Ranunculaceae family as the more … Read more
Right now I have patches of snowdrops coming into bloom. The earliest appeared on Christmas day, followed by a long fallow period while winter did its worst. Now, the daylight hours last longer and the snowdrops are brave enough to emerge. I have a score of different varieties, but my favorite—the one I have been … 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
