People rejoice in the summer sun and plants respond with lush growth. But there can be too much of a good thing. I’ve recently been reminded of that. My houseplants spend the summer every summer in the fresh air and sweet breezes of my yard, in the shade of buildings and trees. This year, I […]

Spring has finally sprung and the plants are springing out of the soil. Some will spring farther than others, so this is the time when I’m thinking about tying and support. Inside the conservatory, climbing plants are relatively easy to deal with. They’re in pots, so you can stick a little trellis right in the […]

The lovely thing about sowing annual flowers from seed is that there’s such as wide choice of colors and varieties. The sad thing is that in my Chicago climate, seeds sowed after the last average frost date, while the soil is still cool, will take weeks to sprout and get going. There isn’t enough time […]

I love the light, airy feel of ferns. Unfortunately, this is one category of houseplants that have a very tough time making it through the heating season in the dry air of a living room. A conservatory? That’s much more likely to be good fern habitat. One of my favorite places is the Fern Room […]

What in the world is as weird and wonderful as carnivorous plants? At first, it seems so odd and wrong that some plants can eat animals. Yet seems to me that bug eating is a remarkable and inspiring adaptation to the tough circumstances in which these species eke out a living. The weirdness is what […]

We’re having some character-building weather in Chicago. The thermometer got all the way up to zero today (Fahrenheit—that’s 17.5 below zero for you centigrade folks). I was bumbling down a sidewalk wearing layers of leggings, multiple socks, gloves within mittens, and so much headgear I could hardly peer out. I passed a nonchalant tree, standing […]

One of the biggest trends in indoor gardening nowadays is hydroponics—growing plants indoors, usually under lights, with their roots in water that is enriched with fertilizer. This technique (fine-tuned in the last decades of the 20th century for the discreet production of marijuana) is now developing into a small but significant sector of agriculture. If […]

I don’t believe I’d ever seen as many big leaves outside of a conservatory as I did in Buffalo, New York, last summer. In the small residential gardens I was touring, elephant ears in pots were everywhere, doing their best to bring a tropical air to the place. I could easily understand why a hint […]

Over the last few years I’ve come to a greater appreciation of begonias, both in conservatories and outside in the garden. Because my main garden is on the north side of a four-story building, I’m always interested in ways to bring colors other than green to the shade. Like many gardeners, I used to rely […]

On a sunny August day, as I weed among the bee balm and tickseed, some of my favorite garden companions are likely to bustle by: bumblebees. They never move fast, but they never stay still. Every moment of a bumblebee’s day is busy, collecting nectar for food and pollen to feed the young. I love […]

Whenever I see lawn grass start to go dormant in the summer I remember a guy I once met in a Chicago suburb who had replaced his front lawn with a carpet of prickly pear cactus. It kept kids and dogs out of his yard, he said, and he didn’t have to water it. Doing […]