I find lots of inspiration in the works of contemporary botanists, designers, gardeners and plant lovers, but I also comb through history for role models. A few weeks ago, Skylands, New Jersey’s official botanical garden, held its annual plant sale. This year’s sale included a used book table and I found my dose of inspiration … Read more
Bleeding heart—Lamprocapnos spectabilis–has shed seeds, if not blood, all over my garden. I probably planted the first one deliberately ten years ago, though I have no memory of doing so. Now, they are everywhere. Normally those words would constitute the start of a rant about garden thuggery. In this case, however, I have no complaint. … Read more
My relationship with mulch has long been fraught with equal amounts of love, hate, drama and boredom, not to mention a lot of heavy lifting. Did I mention guilt? Guilt clings to mulch like barnacles on a ship’s hull. Around this time five years ago, I arranged for a truckload of shredded cedar mulch to … Read more
The daisy or Compositae family is so large—950 genera, 20,000 species and even more cultivated varieties and hybrids—that you could fill hundreds of gardens with family members without even thinking about plants from outside the clan. Over the last three decades or so, individual daisy genera, including coneflower, asters, Shasta daisies and blanketflower, have caught … Read more
Lately the morning news is full of breathless anchor people announcing that someone in some suburb has sighted a coyote. Easterners thought coyotes were romantic back when they howled at us long-distance from the West; it’s different now the feral canines are here among us. The coyotes are keeping company in our backyards, parks, train … Read more
