THE FUTURE IS GREEN in Pittsburgh’s famous glasshouse I saw one of the world’s great greenhouses last month when I visited Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh. One of the largest conservatories in the world, with soaring, lacelike Edwardian architecture framing the glass overhead, it has 17 separate indoor garden spaces – pools, gorgeous […]

Ed knows that gardens are for kids as well as adults. That’s why this veteran television and radio personality, book author, and head of Ed Hume Seeds included a children’s educational garden around his family-owned seed-packing factory in Puyallup, Washington. School groups—and grownups too—come to visit throughout the year. However, Ed’s idea of garden education […]

  As the summer winds down and the garden outside the greenhouse is wan and fading, up pop the dahlias. With jaunty bright flowers on tall stalks, they scoff at the coming of fall like flamboyant Auntie Mame defying middle age. There are dahlias of many colors, mostly in pinks, reds, oranges and yellows, with […]

Right now it’s prime home garden touring season in the Pacific Northwest. Many organizations raise funds by letting the public peek behind their neighbors’ fences. Garden tours are a terrific way to gather real-life inspiration for your own projects. Here’s what I found on the Association of Northwest Landscape Designers tour in Portland, Oregon. Give […]

Inside a greenhouse, it’s fairly easy to control the water your plants get. Out under the open sky, it’s harder. Normally, by July, I would be starting to tire of the watering routine; the hoses seem to get heavier with every summer day that passes. This year, since the Chicago area got almost 8 inches […]

Not long after she married financier and philanthropist Ogden Mills in 1882, Ruth Livingston inherited her childhood home in Staatsburg, New York.  With views of the Catskill Mountains, the house at Staatsburg perches over sweeping lawns that stop just short of the Hudson River. The Livingston family had been prominent landowners in the Hudson Valley […]

A few months ago I was walking the aisles of the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, inspired by all the great ideas on display. But I had a garden conundrum of my own, and I couldn’t figure out how to solve it. Twenty-two years ago I had planned and planted my garden. Two long […]

Located precisely on the dividing line between the states of New York and New Jersey is a greenhouse and gardens that helped shape American garden history. It is the garden of Helena Rutherford Ely at Meadowburn farm in Vernon, New Jersey. She was the much celebrated author of A Woman’s Hardy Garden, first published in […]

In his New York rooftop greenhouse, Rex Stout’s fictional armchair detective Nero Wolfe had three rooms for a wide variety of orchids. No insect entered that greenhouse. But although Wolfe was an obsessive hybridizer, it was bees, wasps and flies, far more than orchid fanciers, who had created his collection’s extravagant range of shapes and […]

  Last month in this column, I talked about modern-day plant hunter Dan Hinkley. One of his favorite plants is the white dove tree (Davidia involucrata). This month, the white dove tree is blooming in my garden. Festoons of white-green bracts look like wings. They shelter round black inch-wide flowers that could resemble doves’ eyes. […]

The very first glasshouses were not entirely made of glass. That is, their construction did not entail four walls that consisted primarily of glass. But they were surprisingly large, and designed for a specific purpose—the storage of container-grown citrus trees in winter. In Italy these “limonaia” (related to the “orangerie” later developed in France) had […]