July 2005

Talitha forwarded to me this excerpt from an email she had written to a friend concerning our abnormally hot weather. She had gone to the trouble of compiling our handwritten notations of maximum and minimum temperature, which Cadie writes down in my Lee Valley Gardening Journal. "Apparently, we got our 'normal' summer weather in April [...]

Perhaps my weather-induced misery has been exacerbated by a newly heightened awareness of what the heat and humidity are doing to my garden. The Weather-Resilient Garden : A Defensive Approach to Planning & Landscaping is not a book for the horticultural hypochondriac. After I finished it, every spot or other disfigurement on any plant I [...]

A month and a half ago, a friend in Texas complained that it was in the 70s at 6:30am. Well, guess what? Yesterday it was 72 degrees here outdoors at 6:30am--and 82 in the kitchen! Hel-lo-o! This is supposed to be a cold climate. We don't have air conditioning because it's supposed to be a [...]

Among the many plants recommended for children, there are those that feel good (Lambs' ears comes to mind) and those that smell good (take your pick) and those that taste good (herbs), but this is one of the few plants I know that's fun to watch. Known by the ungainly name of Red-Sepaled Evening Primrose, [...]

If you have a rash or other skin problem that you think might be plant related, trying using the search engine at the Botanical Dermatology Database. I checked out my family's old enemy Pastinaca sativa (aka wild parsnip), and learned a few things. First of all, wild parsnip and cultivated parsnip are the same thing, [...]

I saw this at Prairie Point. I thought it was pretty interesting. Bill's been to a lot more states than I have. I included the drive-throughs for me (Delaware and Massachusetts). And I spent a week in London in my junior year of high school, thanks to my grandmother. Come to think of it, New [...]

This is bugging me so much I actually was dreaming about it, so I hope you can help. I still can't figure out on which blog I read about the weeding poppies rule (see previous post). I think it is the same blog that posted about Campanula rapunculoides, the Roving (to put it mildly) Bellflower. [...]

With the heat and incredible humidity we've been having, I've basically been ignoring the garden, with the exception of watering the few starts from a friend that I put in the ground just before this most recent heat wave began. Most of them are toast, anyway, despite my best efforts. But today, today was a [...]