As hot days and warm nights begin to color the pages of July, there are very few nurseries with display gardens that can boast of peak season. But then, there are very few that have devoted their businesses to the pleasures of the water garden – and July is National Water Gardening Month for [...]
A flower is the culmination of a seed’s story. And while there are as many stories out there as flowers, every once and awhile one of those stories stands out from the rest and deserves to be told. Sometimes it deserves to be shouted. Such is the story of one man, his family’s seed [...]
Join me in this series as I visit some of Frederick County, Maryland’s finest independent garden centers to find out what makes them unique. Finding and buying plants that you love is often much more pleasurable than figuring out how to successfully incorporate them into your landscape once you get home. We all struggle with [...]
I spent a quiet afternoon two weeks ago working in a small garden outside my guest room windows. The room is built into a sloping bank and partially surrounded by a deck, and therefore the garden is not only visible on an intimate level from below, but from a larger, birds-eye view above – a [...]
Shopping for plants is good. Shopping for heirloom vegetables is even better. But when you combine those plants and veggies with a hand-crafted beer, then add a band, a food truck and a lot of loungeable patio furniture on a weekend in the summer, you have the makings of Heaven on earth. That’s the vibe [...]
Usually, a couple of hours outside on my hands and knees is all it takes to get the wheels of the mind careening toward a publishable, if highly editable, product. This week, it took ten minutes. Ten minutes of repetitive grasping, pulling and tossing massive wads of reddening Japanese Stilt Grass (Microstegium vimineum) [...]
I have a friend who has always considered a weekly bouquet of fresh flowers a necessity. She is French however, and they are presumably taught such things at their chic mothers’ beautifully sculpted knees. For years I have secretly admired her resolute stance on the subject, but as the daughter of an English father and [...]
Few things motivate a gardener the way that getting a plant ahead of another gardener does; and by the end of August we need motivation more than we need food and water. To that end, I would like to draw your attention to the random assortment of bulb catalogs that started showing up two months [...]
Where do you and your garden stand right now? Let me take a wild guess. The spring flush of puppy love is gone, obviously. That was so yesterday. I’m betting your excitement over a summer romance is also over. These things never last. In fact, with the first volunteer pumpkins ripening on the compost pile, [...]
For all the successes I have had with our new garden at Oldmeadow, there are parts of this space that defy any attempts to create beauty. They are so awkward, so large, so weedy and so uninspiring that had I ten times the budget I am not certain I could solve them, unless that budget [...]
Are you struggling with the neighborhood in which you live? Are the 'cons' besting the 'pros' no matter how long you make that list? Are promises of 'urban renewal' by elected officials merely promises, or worse, unsophisticated attempts lacking vision and funding? Most importantly, are you unable or unwilling to move? Maybe you have more [...]
Are you proud of what’s coloring up the garden this year? Are you wondering if all the time, energy and money you have spent on growing the perfect tomato is worth it? Perhaps it’s time for an outside opinion. Perhaps it’s time for a tomato tasting. 'Midnight Snack' - (Park Seed) An All-America Selections [...]
This week I have been clearing a couple of my raised vegetable beds of cabbage, garlic, shallots and ancient pea vines to make room for a few last chance direct sowings of carrots, turnips, chard, beets, beans and squash. Some might term this a fall sowing, but mentally I’m not quite there yet, preferring instead [...]
As we begin to move later into the year and approach the fabulous fall planting season, it’s time to think about the trees we’d like to see sharing our space. Time flies by quickly and you don’t want to find yourself saying “Why on earth didn’t we plant that oak thirty years ago?” [...]
One of the most popular talks I've been giving lately deals with maintenance and balancing one’s life with one’s garden – more specifically, not taking on a project that creates six new maintenance projects in the foreseeable hereafter when the lifeboat is already taking on water. And to those watching me bounce around the podium, [...]
Temperatures are rising, and motivation to cultivate the garden around us is dropping – even if such cultivation is as simple as waving a hose over a tasteful assortment of patio pots. Verbascum thapsus colonizing the site of a crumbled bank barn. You are no doubt seeing the beginnings of stress [...]
“I’ve got a column for you,” said my well-dressed host as we toured his garden not so long ago. I gave him my full attention – Calliope isn’t consistently cooperative each week and one must seize upon inspiration whenever it is offered. “How,” he said, inserting a dramatic pause, “can we make August exciting?” [...]
September is bringing cool, early morning breezes to the garden which invite a bit of work – albeit under the pretext of slipping outside for a wander with coffee in hand. Lower humidity levels have also been gifted to us, quite possibly making it an actual crime to go inside when life has finally returned [...]
A view does not merely exist in the world of sweeping Montana pastures or rocky coastlines in Maine. It is as simple as a framed viewpoint – a scene on a micro or macro level that encourages you to stop and absorb it. Whether we obsess or merely potter, it’s our job as gardeners to [...]
“WHAT are you wearing?!?” I was asked this the other day by a friend who dropped by to find me clothed in some terrible mixture of camisole and cargo short paired with heavy boots. I wasn’t winning fashion awards, but such is my summertime garden wardrobe and I told her so – explaining why sandals [...]
