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 […]

Question: do you garden by memory? By that I mean is the gardenia on your windowsill a remembrance of a scent-filled conservatory visited on a rainy day? Or are the geraniums on the patio the same sort as your mother grew? Hands up: mine is the one waving frantically in the corner. Once I had […]

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 […]

The weather forecast was foreboding, with the third major winter storm in two weeks about to hit the northeast. But the blinding snow and lashing winds that my Amtrak train hurtled through on its way to Philadelphia belied the beautiful, springtime ambiance awaiting me inside the 2018 Philadelphia Flower Show. This premier horticultural event, presented […]

Plant lust. If you garden, you’re probably susceptible. You fall in love with a plant—or many plants—and then find yourself wandering your yard, not knowing how to fit your exciting new beauties into your garden’s design. So in anticipation of my own yearly plant lust, I’m turning to Portland, Oregon designer, Darcy Daniels. Would she […]

On certain nights in January this year, more than ninety percent of the U.S. shivered with temperatures under 30 degrees F. Especially vulnerable were those plants with evergreen foliage. So what’s a gardener to do? If you couldn’t trundle susceptible plants into a greenhouse or other shelter when the cold hit, how do you help […]

The Mid-Century Modern Landscape is the title of my recent book. It’s rather misleading because it’s about gardens: I’m old school and I think of landscape as the natural surroundings in which we build or shape our dreams: The Parthenon is set in a dramatic landscape; my greenhouse is part of my garden. Oh, well, […]

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 […]

This spring I visited Heritage Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts, to see the rhododendrons in bloom. These 100 acres were formerly the estate of Charles Dexter, who, beginning in 1921, spent years propagating and raising thousands of rhododendrons.  He gave many to friends and neighbors without keeping records of these gifts, which is why new Dexter […]

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 […]

High elevations and low waterfall mean gardening in the southwest depends a lot on what you might call “mechanical intervention”; glasshouses and tunnels for season extension and irrigation to compensate for shortages are the chief tools at the gardener’s disposal. Developed by the ancient Romans, adapted by the Moors in pre-Christian Spain, aqueducts fed water […]

I love when I come across a new (to me) gardening term. I’d never heard the word fascine, until I talked with Vanessa Gardner Nagel, award-winning landscape designer and author. She mentioned she was building fascine to stabilize the slope in her Pacific Northwest ravine garden. A fascine, she explained, is a bundle of sticks […]