Great gardeners and optimists know that a dead plant represents an opportunity to grow something new. But what of a dead tree? What of five? So much opportunity at one time can cloud a mind already weakened by the fumes of a chainsaw. It’s probably best then to stifle knee-jerk reactions – particularly the [...]
Not satisfied with feeling overwhelmed with spring cleaning, spring wardrobe changeover, spring home repairs and spring holiday plans, I thought it might be clever to go outside last week, pick up a trowel and increase my anxiety in the spring garden. Beginning the process means a shift in priorities and a horrifying realization of everything [...]
About two years ago in the early winter months, I spied three pileated woodpeckers on an ash tree outside my office window and immediately felt like an Audubon rock star. These are large, colorful birds – the sight of which gives the amateur birder a feeling of accomplishment. The sight of three sent this ignoramus [...]
If you look carefully, there are very few places teeming with more stories than an airport terminal. In more innocent days when such things were still allowed, I’d hang out occasionally at the international arrivals gate watching people reconnect after time apart. The idea that I should have so much free time on my hands [...]
Well, that’s December over with. I say this with a great deal of regret, as December is my resting month in the garden and it is always too short. Last night I happened across a differing opinion in an early essay* by British celebrity gardener and writer Monty Don. He sharpened his tongue against the [...]
Now that the garden has gently shifted into architecture and mush, it’s time to reflect on the plants we grew this season and decide whether we’ll continue to grow them for seasons to come. Whether sexy new introductions or old favorites, plants excite each one of us for totally different reasons and what lights [...]
A little shifting of the pot ghetto yesterday revealed one too many plants happily rooted in the soil beyond their pots. It is good soil certainly, and I do not blame them, but the discovery is an inconvenient one. I have been quite content to believe that a healthy three foot dawn redwood was satisfied [...]
Many believe wholeheartedly that the time to plan your garden is in the depths of winter. Perhaps this is true in terms of the minutiae; but after years of implementing the overreach that winter weather inspires in the bedraggled, I cannot recommend it. No, the time to plan next year’s garden is now, before the [...]
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) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The wind storms of late have added substantially to workloads out here. I’d only just finished with the last of the planting when toppled pots forced me to dig two large holes yesterday to house now homeless dwarf arborvitae. I resented every minute of it – not least of all because there are two far [...]
I can’t remember which of the many gardening books I was reading the day I jubilantly came across the statement, “If you can garden in the Mid-Atlantic you can garden anywhere.” My self-satisfied smirk widened further when I realized that the author wasn’t even a Mid-Atlantic gardener himself. This gave his words great gobs of [...]
