Last week I spotted an alluring plant in the garden center. It was in full bloom, offering up a cloud of small, white blossoms and a billowing habit. I reached for it, imaging exactly where in the garden it would go. Then I saw the label—Gypsophilia paniculata or baby’s breath. I stopped in mid-reach. Baby’s … Read more
The tall asters in my garden are finishing their bloom extravaganza, which makes me a bit sad. It is the last big hurrah of the gardening season and it means that I will have to cut them all back, which is not a small endeavor. It also means that I won’t have another big, Cecil … Read more
Life is full of ironies. A woman who used to live in my neighborhood loved gardens and gardening, but spent long days working as a nurse. Between career, family and other obligations, she never had time to create the garden of her dreams. Finally she found the money to hire a garden designer/installer who brought … Read more
I have a space in a shady part of the garden where nothing succeeds except hellebores, and a “volunteer” privet shrub that is the offspring of the line of privets that bounds the front of the garden. This semi-dead zone is probably semi-dead because of its proximity to a middle-aged maple tree that sucks up … Read more
My father used to call them “salad birds”. Reference guides refer to them as Spinus tristus. Most of us know the bright, acrobatic birds as goldfinches. Though they look as colorful as parakeets, guidebook authors sometimes damn these songbirds with faint praise because of their ubiquitous presence among us. All I know is that American … Read more
