Hardy plants for hardy souls
Henry Nicholson Ellacombe believed that every great gardener reads a lot of gardening books: I have always found that a lover of gardens and flowers is also more or less a lover and reader of books. … and the more they love their gardens and their flowers the more they wish to read about them; [...]
I picked up Roy Diblik's The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden from the library shelf because I knew the author supplied the plants for the Lurie Garden in Chicago, working closely with designer Piet Oudolf, and I wanted to learn more about the naturalistic style of gardening that both of these men espouse. Yes, there is [...]
I've got daffodils on my mind. Daffodils and snowdrops. As another several inches of snow fall from the sky, and the temperature once again plummets below zero (Fahrenheit), my craving for spring grows ever stronger, and every night before getting ready for bed, I go to my happy place, the springtime of the mind. One [...]
What do cold climate gardeners do in the winter, after they have wrung every drop of enjoyment out of their now-bedraggled seed catalogs? Why, they read gardening books, of course. To help my readers in this endeavor, I have assembled all the books that I have either read or are in my possession that relate [...]
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that everyone who loves gardening wants everyone they love to love gardening. It may not be your best friend who you want to convert--uh, get hooked--that is, become interested in gardening. Perhaps it is your grown children, or the young couple who moved in down the street and keeps [...]
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 [...]
Jessica Walliser's new book,Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden: A Natural Approach to Pest Controlrecently published by Timber Press, turns the gardener's view of insects upside down. Suddenly, they are no longer the enemy, but allies you encourage by the way that you garden. Jessica and I had a lively email "chat" that I hope [...]
I always thought my garden held marvels, but until I read A Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants by Ruth Kassinger, I didn't realize just how marvelous it was. And if you told me I was going to find a book on the [...]
Pity those gardeners in warmer climes who garden all through the winter. Scarcely are the holidays over, and their hellebores are up and crocuses are showing buds. They never get to put up their feet and completely ignore what the plants are doing outside. We cold climate gardeners, on the other hand, can fully and [...]
Apprentice to a Garden: A new urban gardener goes wild by Evelyn Hadden is a collection of essays chronicling the development of Hadden's garden and her growth as a gardener. Evelyn starts out as "the omnipotent landowner," but gradually discovers that she doesn't know enough to be a totalitarian dictator. She begins observing more, and [...]
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