As is usual at this time of year, I am touring other people’s gardens one day only to spend the next 48 hours in mine, rethinking everything from plant choices to maintenance plans. It’s one of the best ways I know of re-charging the batteries during a season that doesn’t stop for stragglers, but it [...]
By this point in your seed starting efforts, you are most likely aware of what is working and what is not. Perhaps you have a plastic container full of seed packets you were supposed to start and probably won’t, and a large basketful of empty seed packets you were supposed to record and [...]
Very few of us can honestly say we look better naked. Fabric is a true and loyal friend, and that bond grows ever stronger as we age. This week I have been pondering such truths as I stared unashamedly at my friend Harry Lauder (or rather his walking stick) from my bedroom window, and realized [...]
Last week, an audience member at a lecture asked me how I take time to enjoy my garden. She liked to sit down, she said, and had benches everywhere to that end, but the minute she actually relaxed into one of them, her eyes would see a weed, or a wilting flower, or one of [...]
We launch right in, don’t we? Even before the stores have had a chance to discretely remove the de-icing supplies and replace them with citronella buckets, we have moved mountains out there. Some of us, quite literally. The chores in the spring garden are too numerous to list and we wouldn’t have time to refer [...]
Taking a friend home the other day, we briefly stopped at my house first. From the windows of the car I stared at the new growth popping up in the Yellow Garden that leads to the front door. Bright chartreuse infused all with a light haze of spring color, though many taller structural elements still [...]
This morning I spent two precious hours as a machete-wielding rock climber cutting back vines and brambles. This is not an unusual occupation when you live in a woodland, but today I was there for one reason and one reason only: to free from suffocation the immature redbuds that have seeded themselves along the lane [...]
By the beginning of April, seed starting has been featuring heavily on the gardener’s weekend to-do list, claiming what little time we have between catch-up laundry and filing the dreaded 1040. By the time we finally draw breath and look around at the new life perhaps springing out of hedgerow and front walkway, it has [...]
If you prefer to grow much of your garden from seed, the process of starting it can be a chaotic mess that will plague you from February till the growing season finally comes to an end in autumn. You’ll have two months off and then before you know it, you’ll be starting the process [...]
Wednesday night’s after-school activities (and I suppose one could argue, after-life activities) consist of a long drive to a neighboring community where my daughter attends her confirmation class, and I hunt for a quiet chair, an electrical outlet and an unemployed Muse to come and sit with me awhile. If the garden has seen much [...]
It’s the first day of SPRING and in celebration I’ll be giving away a copy of my new book 'Big Dreams, Small Garden' each month of the growing season ahead! If you’re struggling with a tough space or budget and need a bit of guidance/inspiration/commiseration and a ton of gorgeous photos to get you excited [...]
Well, it certainly feels as if we’ve thwarted the groundhog. Yet I have thought this many times during my life on the East Coast and ended up with two inch green stubs to harvest for an evening’s Caesar salad. Winter will bite back before it is all done, and neither we nor our plants will [...]
Over the last eight years, I have written many columns encouraging people to face the space in which they find themselves and to create the garden that lives within them. Particularly in the midst of the difficult economic period of the last decade. Disturbingly, one of the things that I often heard when I initially [...]
Tempus fugit, and it’s currently fugiting at an alarming pace. I am recently returned from trips and conferences that swallowed up December and January in phases of preparation, execution and recovery, and Christmas is still sitting on the dining room table, neatly compartmentalized and just tidy enough to consider throwing a blanket over it till [...]
I’ve just returned from an exhausting but eye-popping week at MANTS, the annual Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show in Baltimore. And, 3000 booths and a lot of handshakes later, I am now sitting in a pile of glossy, wildly gorgeous literature and trying to figure out what might be of interest to readers (and to myself) [...]
There are few persons more strident as those who have once loved a thing only to turn their backs upon it, unless of course it is those who have hated, and now love with equal fervor. In time, both groups will suffer the well-deserved jabs of those who knew them before their evangelization, but such [...]
Given sufficient provenance, the memory of a plant can hold a place in our affections just as the memory of an old love affair. In fact, such floral memories are perhaps sweeter, for they do not carry the attached nonsense of end-of-the-line supernovas or unresolved conversations – the bitter that always taints the sweet. They [...]
We'd had a bad day, he and I. Not together mind you, but each in our separate lanes, navigating the daily demons that divert us all from enjoying the precious days we are granted on this Earth. Broken water lines, missed deadlines and a pointless conversation with a computerized banker featured heavily in that [...]
A dry hot April, a wet cold May. What is the world coming to? Late April freezes have nixed the wisteria show for gardeners, yet month long May rains would have made the whole thing fairly pointless anyway. Ye Gods! I am in turns content with a forced respite from the garden as I finish [...]
We’ve all got them. Tchotchkes. Knick knacks. Doodads. More kindly put – and through squinted eyes – objets d’art. Unless you’re a minimalist with an inflexible disposition, your rooms and shelves are probably home to many ‘little bits’ that make you smile and evoke a memory (or the image of a dust cloth). From where [...]
