The Victorians and Edwardians had a passion for rock or alpine gardens, creating extensive pseudo-alpine landscapes from actual rocks, artificial rocks and various forms of debris, up to and including broken dishes. Fashionable gardeners filled the cracks and crevices of these layouts with alpine plants newly discovered by plant hunters in various mountainous regions of … Read more
One of the best plants in my garden is spiderwort—Tradescantia virginiana. The flowers are a vibrant shade of blue purple and have three petals apiece. Perched at the tops of relatively stout stalks, the blooms appear in clusters. Their lives are short but beautiful–individual flowers last only one day apiece. The long slender leaves curl … Read more
Christopher Lloyd –1921-2006—was an opinionated curmudgeon and one of the twentieth century’s greatest gardeners. A native of England’s East Sussex, he was a great cook, writer, bon vivant, lover of opera and a fount of horticultural knowledge. He loved dachshunds and named his own after favorite flowers. He did not suffer fools. Though Lloyd was … Read more
DISTANT DRUMS The Sound of Music, a wonderful Rogers and Hammerstein musical, has a song in the first act called “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” in which the Mother Abbess of an Austrian convent muses tunefully about how to deal with an errant postulant. As fans of the musical know, Maria, … Read more
Four years ago I planted a little Carolina silverbell tree—Halesia Carolina, sometimes known as Halesia tetraptera–in front of my house. It wasn’t much of a tree then. Rescued from potential oblivion after failing to sell at a charity plant sale, it was only about four feet tall. I had a space that needed a tree … Read more
