Cold Climate Gardening

Yesterday I managed to plant the three delphiniums I had wanted to plant last Saturday. These are not any delphiniums, mind you, but Foerster’s hybrids. I first learned of Foerster’s delphiniums in an essay of the same title by Thomas Fischer, in the collection edited by Jamaica Kincaid called My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners […]

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Mary, gardening in Virginia, is hardly ever contrary, can’t say no . . . to plants, and loves dark chocolate. Worth checking out, wouldn’t you say?

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Normally I’m a big fan of Target, but this time they’ve got it all wrong. Fifty bucks for the Sarah Hilton Folk Art Garden Tools? I don’t think so. We’re talking one flimsy looking trowel and a hand cultivator (does anyone really use those things?) “hand painted by artist Sarah Hilton.” We real gardeners know […]

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On Saturday I thoroughly weeded the Juneberry bed in front of the house, in preparation for putting in three delphiniums that have been patiently waiting in pots. Didn’t quite get to planting them before darkness set in, which is a pity, as we are supposed to get rain today and tomorrow. (Went to the zoo […]

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I recently learned that the area around my house that the kids play on is not a lawn but a cropped meadow. Ken Druse, writing in The Passion for Gardening: Inspiration for a Lifetime, describes a cropped meadow as “simply the grasses and non-grass plants (or forbs) that were already there, cut short (and never […]

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The author of Sunny Side Studio knows how to translate gardenspeak. Here’s a sampling of the wisdom to be found in his most recent post:
Wild life garden – an area that has been completely neglected.
Bog garden – a badly drained area that it is impossible to cultivate in any way.
Wild flower meadow – a […]

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What’s your favorite tool? I’ve found that I can’t garden without a garden fork. It is absolutely indispensable. It goes into the ground much more easily than a spade or shovel, though a small spade is handy for digging out plants for trans-planting. Now I’ve found a hand fork is almost as indispensable. […]

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