Snow crunches under foot, and a white quilt covers the landscape, reflecting and refracting bright sunlight across the wintery scene. Animal tracks show that squirrels, rabbits, and deer are still foraging, but miraculously your plants are alive and safe from them. This is because your entire garden is concentrated inside a 220 Square foot Hartley Lodge […]
Whether gardeners bring favorite houseplants to a sunny windowsill, or retire them to a greenhouse for winter enjoyment, the act of gardening still goes on in the colder months. So here are some practical—and often overlooked—indoor gardening gifts to add to your list. Cachepots: Humble pots can be slipped inside these beautiful containers. Choose them […]
Glass and gardens are great partners. The dynamics of blown glass capture the echoes of plant growth. I love to see the gleam of glass—small colorful float balls tucked into containers; robust spears stretching upward as focal points; bright dishes spreading open like lilies to capture rainwater among the foliage. But it wasn’t until I […]
The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York—most often associated with yoga and alternative philosophies — decided to apply mindfulness to a very practical matter. The Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL ) opened in 2009. At the heart of the OCSL is the Eco Machine ™, designed by John Todd Ecological Design. This water reclamation […]
The trees are abandoning their leaves, the perennials are giving up on their leaves and stems and I’m dumping out my pots of annuals. And all the abandoned plant debris from the yard, garden or greenhouse ends up in the compost. I’m amazed every March to find a bounty of compost in bins that started […]
Colin Cabot was standing at the edge of a steep ravine in the gardens of Les Quatre Vents (The Four Winds). A swaying Nepalese-style rope bridge hung in a downward arc between the ravine’s precipitous banks. “Who wants to go first?” Colin was leading forty of us garden writers and photographers on a private tour […]
Meadowbrook, a 25 acre-estate in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, was designed and created by the floral artist, J. Liddon Pennock, Jr. Mr. Pennock grew up in Philadelphia, where his family had operated a florist shop for over 100 years. He attended Cornell University, but was called home to help save the family business in 1933. That business […]
Now is the time I have to steel myself against the autumn gardener’s worst enemy: complacency. We’re having lovely weather at the beginning of October, with clear blue skies, low humidity and days in the upper 70s or low 80s. Though most flowers except the toad lilies, the last anemones, turtlehead and a few unwary […]
Summer’s ending. Tomatoes are still on the vine, but they take longer to ripen now, as the days grow shorter. I’ve pinched off the blossoms so my plants can concentrate on ripening the fruits they already have and not setting new ones. Basil still puts on new leaves but not with the abundance of July […]
America’s first horticultural library, a major breakthrough in plant science, and the founding of an important American cultural institution—all these and more occurred in the same spot, what was once a bucolic farm in North Philadelphia. The neighborhood has changed, but I was fortunate recently to participate in a day-long tour of Philadelphia sites that […]
When you grow your own fruit, vegetables and greenhouse crops you fully understand the time and effort that is invested into every mouthful. The Grow Your Own fanatic is not going to waste a morsel; every tomato, bean and cucumber will be devoured with relish, or simply pickled, jammed or chutneyed, or just eaten fresh […]
