Daphne mezereum

‘The fool remembers only misfortunes and past errors...nothing can take away gratitude for past blessings.’ Rudolph Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener. Every fall, as I sit down to write these final Notes of the year, I am convinced that this gardening year was unique, that it resembled no other and that it was, simultaneously, much like [...]

As a child, I went to sleep on Christmas Eve with a sense of anticipation and excitement. What was I going to find under that tree in the morning? As a gardener, the first mild days of mud season bring that same excitement and anticipation, except now it goes on for weeks: What am I [...]

According to the National Weather Service, it's the least snowy beginning to winter that we've had since 1998. We've set also some record highs in the last few weeks. Snow can be hit or miss in December but usually the ground is frozen. It was frozen earlier in the month, but right now it's not, [...]

February daphne (Daphne mezereum) is blooming now for me--before the forsythia, before any rhodos, before my spicebush. My February daphne is still a baby, given to me by Deborah Banks when I visited her garden last year. Look, it's not much more than a twig: One sniff was enough to convince me that every cold [...]

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. ~John Ruskin, quoted in Adam Gopnik, Winter. It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that this has been a bear of a winter, battering to the body [...]

“I think we may have a wider approach to garden design if we have been helped to appreciate other forms of art; to be aware of basic principles – balance, repetition, harmony and simplicity – which apply to all forms of creativity. To look for these ideas in painting and architecture, or hear them in [...]