colchicum

Crocuses: A Book Review

by Kathy Purdy on January 16, 2011

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.
Henry Mitchell

Colchicum ‘Beaconsfield’

by Kathy Purdy on October 1, 2010

Watering, though apparently easy, is difficult to do properly. Ensuring the roots are neither drying nor drowning is an underappreciated art.
Jeff Gillman, The Truth About Garden Remedies
I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.
Chan Stroman

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day November 2008

by Kathy Purdy on November 24, 2008

And though one has begun to search for signs of spring almost since January, and to receive them, like postcards sent on a long voyage to home, it is with the greening of the grass that spring has, finally, certainly arrived.
Joe Eck, Wayne Winterrowd in A Year at North Hill

Winter sowing, aka cold stratification

by Kathy Purdy on February 5, 2008

That's why it's good to have family or old friends. They keep you from becoming a prisoner of your own obsessions. The world is wide, there are other pleasures in it besides gardening, and sometimes we gardeners just need to have that pointed out to us.
Michele Owens, Garden Rant 31-Aug-2007

Colchicums are beginning to emerge

by Kathy Purdy on September 5, 2007

This is the essence of gardening. Looking forward, planning ahead, feeling as if you are wresting the garden from the grasp of its fatigue. It seems trite to mention it, but fall bed work bestows an enormous amount of pride and sense of accomplishment. It lifts the blues of a brutal year and fills a long winter with the joys of a new spring.
Adrian Higgins, 14 Oct 2010

Kathy’s Autumn Picture Show

by Kathy Purdy on October 21, 2006

To many gardeners, seed catalogues are the most accurate depiction we have of the Garden from which humans were expelled.
NY Times editorial 10 Jan 2011

Pretty in Pink?

by Kathy Purdy on October 11, 2006

There are two difficulties with ground covers: first to get them to grow, and then to get them not to.
Elizabeth Lawrence

Curiouser and curiouser

by Kathy Purdy on October 1, 2006

A garden is a lovely thing
But gardens are not made
By saying "Oh how beautiful"
And sitting in the shade!
Rudyard Kipling

Will the real colchicums please stand up?

by Kathy Purdy on September 26, 2006

Gardening may well be one of the world's most important fantasies.
Henry Mitchell, in The Essential Earthman

My miracle flower

by Kathy Purdy on September 19, 2006

But a garden is somewhat exalted above ordinary notions of correctness. A garden is more than a matter of the right fish fork, as it were.
Henry Mitchell

They’re coming! They’re coming!

by Kathy Purdy on September 1, 2006

Roses are at their best trailing down in graceful trusses. In fact, they are like supermodels--the goods just look better displayed on tall, thin, limbs.
Marylyn Abbott

Currently Fretting About . . .

by Kathy Purdy on May 4, 2006

Gardening is the most profound and complex of the arts, operating not just inessentially or marginally through time, but deliberately and consciously. What makes a garden great is the tension between the dimensions, between what is structurally permanent and what is temporarily, immediately, imposed upon that structure.
Brian Bixley, Essays on Gardening in a Cold Climate

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