daffodils

The garden rule I broke today is: Don't plant flowers in a straight line. And I did it for a very good reason: I wanted a straight line. I've looked at the scene above for many years, and frequently thought to myself how much better it would be to have that swath of daffodils swing [...]

Looking over last year's April Bloom Day post, I see the same things blooming at pretty much the same time. The smaller-and-earlier species crocus are on the wane, but the later-and-larger Dutch crocus are definitely making a color statement. I'm thinking about getting more of these and extending the crocus bank further towards the road [...]

Variegated bulbous oat grass, sweet white violet, and a bit of 'White Nancy' lamium in the lower left cornerBecause of the warm April, a lot of the daffodils that were still blooming last year are done for this year. This is the "gap" time between the early blooming spring flowers and the big June extravaganza [...]

Mother's Day is fast approaching, and many retailers who normally don't feature gardening products have potted flowering plants and other quasi-gardening gifts prominently displayed. I thought I'd take the opposite tack and share with you my favorite non-gardening garden "thingies." Most of them don't qualify as tools. Some of them, quite frankly, would look like [...]

I suppose there exists, somewhere on this planet, an ornamental gardener who has never grown a plant that they had been given from someone else's garden, but it is hard for me to imagine it. Before I even knew myself to be a gardener, when I was just a kid, I tagged along behind the [...]

This looked spectacular earlier in May, but the narcissus were already done by the time Gardeners Bloom Day came around. Those orange-cup daffodils were blooming at my neighbor's, between her house and the brook, but too far away from the house to be noticed. I marked them and dug them up and got half for [...]

Yes, I know the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day was yesterday the day before yesterday. I didn't get finished in time. So just pretend this is May 15th, okay? (As always, hover your mouse over any thumbnail for a caption, and click on any photo for a larger image.) Narcissus Let's start off with the narcissus. [...]

And what is retirement for, if not to make a few dreams come true? And what is a garden for, if not to satisfy the longings of your heart? I have learned a lot from watching the garden of my best garden buddy, Bub, develop. The most satisfying garden, for the gardener and for others, [...]

Time to put my money where my heart is When I was in college, I lived in a third-floor walkup with two fellow students. Whenever anyone shut the front door to the building, all the tenants felt the resulting vibrations. And we subconsciously monitored the sound of footsteps on the stairs, calculating in the back [...]