Philadelphia Garden Show

When you go to the Philadelphia Flower Show, it helps to take along the right attitude. If seeing gorgeous, high concept gardens full of the most fashionable flowers makes you feel insecure, then take yourself elsewhere. If you need a massive dose of color, fragrance, humidity, and horticultural inspiration, then the Philadelphia Flower Show will be perfect for you. On […]

SHOE FLIES AND CHINESE LANTERNS – Gardening

The catalogs are a little slimmer this year, but they are still full of the hope and glory of spring and summer. Flowers, vegetables, fruits and herbs burst forth from the pages, each better than last year, allegedly foolproof and free-flowering, requiring little or no maintenance and a great return on investment. It all goes to show that gardeners are […]

Plumbago Passion

I am very prone to love at first sight. In fact, it happened just last week. I saw a tall southerner “across a crowded room”, as the song says. My heart stood still (as another song says). I was enraptured. The tall stranger was plumbago (Plumbago auriculata, also known as Plumbago capensis), which is sometimes also known by its extremely […]

ALIAS PRIMROSE

When I moved into my house in mid-February a year and a half ago, one of the first things I did was to walk around the yard, and try to figure out what the previous owner had planted. The winter had been exceptionally mild, and she had done little garden clean up, so it was easy to identify the remnants […]

Growers Guide for Starting Seeds Indoors

I have given up indoor seed starting completely on several occasions. The first time it happened I was a novice gardener. I had ordered seeds of just about every plant that I saw in the garden catalogs without thinking about such practical things as gallons of potting soil, hours of daily watering, and square feet of windowsill space. It also […]

Autumn Dilemma

It used to be so easy in my father’s day. In mid-winter, gardeners received mail-order catalogs from many far-flung nurseries and plant purveyors. Mailboxes groaned under the weight of all the catalogs, but no one minded because there is nothing like looking at pages and pages of perfect annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees on a gray, uninspiring day at the […]

Harvesting Garden Berries and Fruit Trees

I have just finished reading The Lost Gardens of Heligan, a wonderful book by [fill in name] Smits. The story, which is true down to the last botanical name, is about the rediscovery and renovation of Heligan, a 19th-century estate in Cornwall. Like many other landed estates at the time, Heligan was almost completely self-sufficient, with the various gardens and […]

A Different Stripe Tulip

Most of the time I lead a rather dull life, and I like it that way. There are days, of course, when I throw caution to the winds and eat shredded wheat instead of toast for breakfast. There are other days when I go for a walk at noon instead of first thing in the morning. But that is about […]

Cabbage Roses – Kale

The November weather this year has been so relatively balmy that roses are still blooming in protected corners of many yards. The last of my cosmos kept going until ten days ago, having bloomed continuously since May. The cosmos petered out about the same time that I gave up deadheading them, so I felt no guilt whatsoever about yanking them […]

Longwood Gardens

From time to time I rail about people who are long on money and short on taste.  The ones that irritate me the most are those who buy themselves “instant” gardens, complete with mature trees, shrubs and perennials, not to mention all manner of overwrought gazebos, water features, ornaments and terraces.  Frequently all of this is crammed onto a ½ […]