Hello, Spring! When you arrive, the party gets started: life comes back to life. Springtime boosts our moods with radiant colors, enticing scents, and warmer, longer days. The dawn chorus of birds sing, “Hallelujah!” And here comes the Spring pageant of peas, asparagus, lettuce, strawberries and herbs. Spring, we can eat you! A less jubilant […]
The storied neo-noir film director Samuel Fuller observed, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.” This sums up the problem with winter: too realistic. When photographing a winter landscape, you must scrutinize the resulting image to detect any trace of color. Occasionally, a shrub’s foliage, berries, or a foraging robin will […]
To technology-glutted moderns, the celebration of the New Year may seem like a fleeting one-day inebriation, a hiccup in the 365-day trajectory it takes for our planet to complete one orbit around the sun. May their hangover cure include realizing that without the sun’s heat and light, they, like the Earth, would be a lifeless, […]
Late summer is a golden time for American gardeners, when their love and nurture of their plants are requited with whiz-bang vegetal yields in the American outdoor living room. This continuing harvest, amidst the elegiacally shortening daylength and fading daylight between the June solstice and September equinox, delivers on spring’s joyful promises and continues into […]
Over dinner recently with Heronswood’s brilliant new plant collector, Simon Crawford, I learned that what we regard as soil resulted from plant life, not the other way around. While not quite as simple as that, it’s true that plants created land, as in “land, ho!” or “this is good earth—our crops will grow here”, etc. […]
After giving a speech to 600 garden writers in North Carolina last week, I returned in a state of uncertainty—had anyone heard the underlying message? It was too cerebral, I think, to read a speech to a bunch of pumped up enthusiasts who wanted to chat about the gorgeous Sarah Duke Gardens that surrounded us. […]
It is always an unusual event when you copy someone else and end up discovering that you made the original. As I mentioned last winter in “Camp Obama“, the President and First Lady might have considered breaking ground on their starter garden in private rather than in public. Maybe it’s just my innate sense of […]
Heronswood research horticulturist, William “Bill” Rein, answers a question in the Happiness Garden. A stream of visitors passes by the Heronswood sales area. Signing up for the Heronswood catalogue at the welcome desk. The great teacher, writer and noted hydrangea authority, Dr. Michael Dirr, autographs his book after a packed lecture at Burpee Hall. Our […]
Simon Crawford collects extremely rare plants, both wild and tame, around the world. From the high mountains of Nepal to the obscure markets of Europe to the botanical gardens of faraway South America, he tracks down new and interesting meadow plants as well as historic old cultivars from discarded breeding programs of companies that have […]
On the upcoming 4th of July we celebrate our country’s independence. The annual commemoration comes loaded with spirited symbolism: fireworks, the Stars and Stripes, the rousing National Anthem, marching bands, bandstands draped with tri-colored bunting, citizens attired in colonial dress. The country’s majestic National Bird, the Bald Eagle, perches on signs and banners. This is […]
