Kathy Purdy

When you let plants self-sow, as I discussed in my review of Plantiful, serendipitous things can happen in your garden that surprise and delight you.The poppies in the photo above are second year poppies. I scattered the seed of their parents over my flower bed, but I did nothing for the poppies you see here [...]

In Plantiful: Start Small, Grow Big with 150 Plants That Spread, Self-Sow, and Overwinter, Kristin Green wants to teach you what it took me years to learn: by relaxing my hold on the garden and using self-sowing plants to fill in the gaps, I could enjoy the garden more and work less. Kristin advocates using [...]

There comes a time in every gardener's life when she realizes that a plant she has admired is not all it seems to be. Whatever the initial attraction, another side of the plant is discovered, and the gardener decides the relationship must end. I met Rosa multiflora through his fragrance. At this time of the [...]

My patience has been rewarded. The days of staring at mostly-bare-dirt beds with puny divisions of shrubs and perennials are over. The beds that I created the soonest after we moved in have now filled in. Granted, there are a lot of self-sowers filling in the gaps, but give me a viola over a dandelion [...]

What's a cold climate gardener doing in Little Rock, Arkansas? Visiting with P. Allen Smith and a couple dozen garden bloggers, for his fourth annual Garden2Blog event. As usual when I visit a southern U.S. area, I felt like I was in an alien land. Here it was, the third week in May. Back home, [...]

This heirloom iris, 'Flavescens', was growing at my former 19th century farmhouse when we moved in. I had to dig it up and divide it to see what color flowers it had, as it was so crowded it didn't bloom that first spring. It bloomed every year once I started caring for it, but rather [...]

At our old house, wild geraniums (Geranium maculatum) grew every place the lawn mower left alone. Or at least it seemed that way. It was always a pleasure to see them carpeting the woods in mid-May, but I certainly didn't check daily on their progress, as I did with my carefully collected and cultivated trilliums. [...]

The forsythias bloomed later than usual this year, sometimes overlapping with the earliest lilacs--but they did bloom. If yours didn't bloom, here are some things to consider: The flowers for forsythia are set the year before they bloom. That means if you prune your shrub too late in the season, you will cut off the [...]

If you've been following my back page, you probably already know that I've been invited to the 2014 version of P. Allen Smith's Garden2Blog. I'll be joining twenty-plus other bloggers for two jam-packed days of tours, demonstrations, and workshops, while squeezing in time to get to know my fellow bloggers and P. Allen Smith himself. [...]