Cold Climate Gardening

Just in case you don’t subscribe to The Economist, I thought I’d let you know what are the top ten bestselling gardening books in all of Amazon-dom. This list is compiled from April 2006 sales figures from all the various Amazons combined.* So, yeah, it’s not the whole world, it’s all the world that shops […]

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First I’d better define my terms. By narcissus, I mean plants in the genus Narcissus, which many know as daffodils or jonquils. By heirloom, I mean that I inherited them. There is probably an official definition of “heirloom” as relates to Narcissus, but I don’t know what it is. I have seen some of my […]

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The next time I doubt the depth of my gardening devotion, remind me that one of the very best Mother’s Days I ever had was spending the entire afternoon pulling garlic mustard out of the Secret Garden with my younger sons. In case you aren’t familiar with it, garlic mustard is a very invasive plant […]

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May is always a busy month, what with birthdays (3 this month), Mother’s Day, a garden going to weeds, and homeschooling paperwork, but this past week had additional expected and unexpected busy-ness. It’s very easy to miss the spring ephemerals if you’re not careful. I know, because I’ve done it before. And if you go […]

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Just read a very informative post by Don over at An Iowa Garden. He describes the hybrid primroses that grow well in his garden, what species they’re descended from, and how they’re labeled–and mislabeled–in the trade. The only thing he didn’t include was the name of merchants who sell accurately labelled plants. Maybe he doesn’t […]

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Perhaps you’ve read it in the sidebar. In one of the random quotations I quote my friend Chan:
I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.
You don’t worry about your garden if you don’t care about it. And if you do care, you fret. At the beginning of the season, […]

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We are on the cusp. We balance for this one moment–these few short days–at the place of middle spring.
The grass has greened, but the trees have not yet burst into full leaf. It is fascinating to look at the hillside and see how different varieties progress. In some places bare wooden branches stick up, rimmed […]

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