Mid-September and I am home to a very dry late summer garden -- but my attitude towards the brown and the leggy and the slumped plants around me has changed dramatically after three weeks travelling the UK and sharing it with fellow gardeners and tour guests in the last week and a half. Brits have [...]
Summer Gets Serious -- Dusk to The Rescue There are moments of feeling overwhelmed in August - many of them. Severe burn out and needing a break from the heat and/or humidity is something we're all feeling -- though social media will rarely show us that reality when we're scrolling in quiet moments of melancholy. [...]
Roses. Peonies. Iris. Philadelphus. Clematis. Rhodos. Allium..... For many gardeners in the Mid-Atlantic, May is the month our garden is almost at its best. Ironically it is also the month that we are usually visiting other gardens and missing the miracles performed by our own. This spring I severely cut back on my speaking schedule [...]
Welcome to February! There are many who do not garden this month, or do not choose to aim for a four-season garden. And while I understand this attitude, particularly if your gardens are covered in two feet of snow for the majority of winter, for me, February is a too-short month that allows me to [...]
A new year, a new growing season. January is a wonderfully busy month in my garden, as I am given the opportunity to get on top of difficult areas of bramble and vine without the overwhelming and often impenetrable problem of foliage. This is the month I attack the woodland garden and the stream banks, [...]
October. It is fleeting, earthy, and all consuming -- and I adore it. This October I will be focusing not as much on the new things I want to acquire and plant during the gentle fall season, but saving those that may have gotten lost in the shuffle over the last few years -- shaded [...]
July. The exuberance of spring is over in the garden, and gardeners are looking at the remains of a pretty good party. But whether your garden looks hungover or not depends on the planting you did in the spring. It also depends a lot on the weather, which has been cruel for the last two [...]
November is the ultimate transition month in temperate Mid-Atlantic gardens. Though it often starts gently, with the slight bite and color of October, by the end of the month we remember what we had forgotten during the growing season - quiet, naked woodlands; spicy, earthy scents, cold - not cool - mornings, and the landscape [...]
The signs of spring right now are real, but can feel illusory when the wind begins to gust or the sun is covered by a passing cloud. But assuming that the earth has not fundamentally changed its course, we should be standing now at the beginning of something wonderful in the Northern Hemisphere. And that [...]
The gardener will be busy this month, and find that the available hours to work bear no relation to the amount of work that needs to be done. That is the hallmark of the June garden. In the Northern Hemisphere, we officially transition in June from the spring garden to the summer garden with the [...]
