If you own a greenhouse, where do you keep your tools and supplies, such as trowels, rakes, scoops, shears, pots, potting soil, fertilizers, pesticides, cleaning gear, and other necessities? All these things collectively take up a lot of space, especially in a small greenhouse. Clutter inside a greenhouse competes with and detracts from the plants, […]

I confess—I’m a poinsettia composter. I tried growing them on after the holidays with my other houseplants, and the results were leggy and dismal. Now I’m talking with Kym Pokorny, a gardener, a 20-year veteran garden writer, and communications specialist at Oregon State University Extension Service. She’s always been interested in this iconic holiday plant. […]

These days, more than ever, words matter. And in the realm of this column I got to wondering about the meaning of conservatory, which is more complex, it turns out, than the one for greenhouse. The latter is pretty much self-explanatory, a house where green things grow. But on turning to my copy of the […]

I recently cooked a Thai dinner with ingredients from my greenhouse, including kaffir lime leaves, galangal, lemongrass, Thai basil, and Thai hot peppers. Here are tips on growing each. Kaffir lime is a small tree with serrated leaves that are chopped or sliced into tiny slivers. To harvest these leaves for Asian meals, buy a […]

It’s the time of year for giving thanks. And as a professional garden writer, I am thankful for the exciting new plants from growers and marketers that I get to trial and review. However, sometimes many seasons pass before plants demonstrate just how good they really are. So, I’d like to share a couple of […]

As I write this in the days before Thanksgiving, snow is falling steadily in the Rockies. It was 60 degrees yesterday, so I had an energetic day, washing windows (the better to see the snow!) and hauling the lawn furniture indoors. In these days of indoor/outdoor blurring, where the conservatory is another room of the […]

The other day I finally got to the bottom of something that had nagged at me for a long time: the compost bin. I hadn’t gotten around to actually harvesting finished compost from that bin for months. That’s an absurd waste in at least two ways: If it’s still in the bin, the compost isn’t […]

Because the temperature in my greenhouse can reach 140oF on a sunny summer day, most of my greenhouse plants spend the summer on my patio. Come fall, however, these plants must be moved back into the greenhouse. For them, it’s rather like returning to an indoor home after enjoying summer at the cooler, breezier beach. […]

Stained glass windows have been around a good deal longer than Glasshouses, yet it would seem that the two have something to offer each other. Wafting around the National Botanic Garden of Ireland  in September I was fulfilling a bucket list item; I’d long known about but never visited the graceful Curvilinear Range and its […]

Recently, while walking through the aisles of the Independent Garden Center trade show in Chicago, I discovered a product I’d never seen before—containerized hedges. A row of neatly sheared plants outlined the booth. Clearly, they were field-grown and root pruned, their branches naturally intermingling. It was a living privacy wall you could buy. It would […]

A Michigan cottage I often visited as a child had an old deer head over the door known as George. He’d been there for decades and his antlers were used as a hat rack. But he had an ancient, moth-eaten dignity about him, and I always think of George when I see a grand staghorn […]

Phillip Johnson’s “Glasshouse” in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of the icons of mid-century modern architecture. Steel-framed and glass-walled (hence its popular name) it seamlessly blends indoors and outdoors. It’s sophisticated simplicity has been the pattern for much early-21st century design. The photograph below, from my book, The Midcentury Modern Landscape,  shows a Johnson-inspired modernist […]