My relationship with the color purple has gone up and down over the years. When I was ten I had a dark purple velvet party dress with a white lace collar. It was my favorite, and I would have worn […]

I love to visit garden centers, and I make it a regular habit throughout the growing season. I don’t always buy, but I live in the hope that I will discover a new and different plant, or find just the […]

For some reason, I have long been one of those sorry individuals who has never succeeded in buying a strawberry jar. I was going to get one last year, but I got distracted and didn’t get around to it until […]

The suburbs are full of secrets, and my neighbor had one. It was not the stuff of soap operas or PBS documentaries or Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reports, but it was still clandestine in a small way. Sometimes, as she passed […]

If the guinea hen flower (Fritillaria meleagris) were a person, it would need therapy. For centuries it has been called all kinds of pejorative names—snake’s head lily, sullen lady, and even leper’s bell. Eminent garden writer Vita Sackville-West did not […]

I know lots of people who live in northern New Jersey who have never been to see the Statue of Liberty. I also know people who live in western New York State who have never visited Niagara Falls. Chances are […]

Every year at this time, gardeners and non-gardeners alike wonder what they should buy for the gardeners in their lives. If you are wealthy enough, this is very easy. Perhaps your favorite gardener can really use a backhoe, complete with […]

Now that the holidays are over, there are garden-related things that I should be doing. I could, for example, go out to the unheated garage and sharpen the blades of my lawnmower. Or, since I like to stay warm, I […]

After much thought, I have decided that working on small projects may give you instant gratification, but working on big projects gives you life itself. I can say this with absolute certainty because at the moment I am working on […]