heirloom_plants

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 [...]

This heirloom iris, 'Flavescens', was growing at my former 19th century farmhouse when we moved in. I had to dig it up and divide it to see what color flowers it had, as it was so crowded it didn't bloom that first spring. It bloomed every year once I started caring for it, but rather [...]

Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Notes from a Gloucester Garden by Kim Smith made me aware of my garden book prejudices: What kind of title is that? You just don't start a title with "oh" and end it with an exclamation point! And then I read the back cover: "Drawn by the tender magic of [...]

I first read Pride and Prejudice in grade school, when my grandmother put a volume of Readers Digest Condensed Classics for Children in my hands. I've read Pride and Prejudice (unabridged) several times since then, but I never had a good grasp of the culture of that day and missed some subtle humor in the [...]

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 [...]