Cold Climate Gardening

The Crocus Bank is looking glorious (click any photo to enlarge it):
But I was pleasantly surprised to see this wee thing: [Read more →]

Photo of Temple Nursery snowdrop courtesy Craig Cramer. All rights reserved.

True to his word, Craig of Ellis Hollow did indeed visit the Temple Nursery on Open Garden Day, and took pictures. If you haven’t stopped over to read his account and get a glimpse of the variety possible within the genus Galanthus, now would be a good time to go take a look. I was out of town and couldn’t go myself, so I really appreciate Craig making time in his busy schedule to photograph what must be the most extensive collection of snowdrops in the United States.

The day after I got home from Austin I started on my post about Spring Fling, the first national garden bloggers meet-up. I decided I was not going to go into a lot of detail, but just upload the best of my photos and comment on them. So I forgot that photos are the most time intensive part of a blog post. So I happened to have a lot of photos I wanted to comment on. So I realized that it’s going to be a whole week tomorrow since this event occurred, and I haven’t written a thing about it. So I’d better try a different approach. (This is it.) [Read more →]

When I was in high school, my mother handed me a mail order bulb catalog and told me I could pick something out to plant. (I guess I had done all right by the daffodils and she wanted to encourage me further.) I was ignorant, but I knew I wanted the earliest blooming bulb I could find that had yellow, sunshiny flowers. By reading the catalog copy and looking at the pictures, I knew winter aconite, or Eranthis, was it.

I planted them on either side of the front walk, under the yews that stood sentry at the front door. They came up that first spring, and every spring after that, earlier than the daffodils. My mother never forgot that I planted them, and when I left home she always mentioned in a letter or phone call that they were blooming, and they reminded her of me.

Beginner’s luck. [Read more →]

Just as we wonder guiltily whether the food we put in our mouth is good for us, so we now wonder just as guiltily whether what we do in the garden is good for the planet. It was not so much that way back in 1991, when this book was published. In fact, I am pretty sure that Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education was my first introduction to the existence of gardening philosophies. Sure, I had realized there were practical considerations (will this help my plants grow?) and aesthetic considerations (does this look pretty?) but ethical considerations? Right or wrong? What a concept! [Read more →]

Congratulations to Mary Laverty, who won a copy of Nightshade, the newest novel in the series by Susan Wittig Albert. Mary followed the link on Susan’s guest post to enter the drawing for the free copy. Each post in Susan’s blog tour has a unique link to a separate drawing for a copy of Nightshade. You’ll find a calendar and links here.

My main snowdrop “patch” exactly a year ago. They are not so far along this year. Click the photo for a close-up

With all my blathering on about snowdrops, I almost forgot to mention that Hitch Lyman’s garden will be the Garden Conservancy’s first New York state event for their 2008 Open Garden Days on April 5, 2008. If you are able to visit his garden, you will think you have died and gone to snowdrop heaven, because Hitch is the proprietor of Temple Nursery, selling the widest selection of snowdrops in the U.S. (growing over 400 different kinds, not all for sale) and the only one shipping them in the green. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Don’s Galanthus ‘Bitton’ and G. woronowii both originally came from Hitch Lyman’s land, even if they’ve made an intermediate stop since then. [Read more →]