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 […]
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 […]
Hail spring, farewell winter, and a rousing welcome to the spring equinox for precisely positioning the earth—and us—in time and space. We watch in awe as the solar conductor rouses the vegetative orchestra to life, transforming fallow plots of land into flourishing gardens. Let there be life! The equinox provides a YOU ARE HERE moment […]
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. […]
They don’t make Labor Day like they used to. The shifting forms and meanings of labor have rendered Labor Day our most nebulous national holiday. For example, in gardening—a leisure activity—Labor Day is incorrectly considered the close of the season. For holiday-goers, it marks the end of summer—despite schools regularly starting weeks before the first […]
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 […]
At 100,000 miles, a car is just getting started. Therefore, it makes no sense for the government to pay folks to turn in cars that are not even broken, much less broken in. In fact, a car improves with age. It acquires a depth of personality and character that only time confers. Like a pet, […]
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 […]
Here in the Northeast, we’re experiencing the coldest, wettest and darkest summer in recent memory. The tomato crops of many farm and home gardens have been decimated by a disease that thrives on just this sort of weather. The disease is late blight, caused by a water mold named Phytophthora infestans. The severity and incidence […]
The “folk music revival” of the beginning of the last century reached the end of the road in the mid 1960s. Anodyne groups like the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary were marketed and promoted to older children, teenagers and college students. I found them a bit too refined and, literally, a “head trip”, […]
