Spectacular Japanese Fountain Grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’), indeed, but it would be so much less without the Bent Grass (Agrostis stolonifera), an Asian native beloved in the Pacific Northwest and considered a weed in the Atlantic Northeast. Photograph taken at Heronswood’s original test and display gardens in Kingston. Get rid of your lawn? Plant […]
A garden is so forward-looking that it resembles sometimes a family or a business enterprise. I’ve even heard someone liken it to a crystal ball, making it surely unique. Seeds are literally prophetic: tiny crystal balls. Within 12 to 18 months, you’ll have exactly what was foretold. This makes gardeners a strong surviving force—we call […]
Three years ago this spring I wrote an op/ed piece for the New York Times (my third) about the then raging “natives versus exotics” controversy. They called it “Border Wars” and it contained a typo (8,000 versus 12,000 years ago for the recession of the last glaciers, due to my confusion over BC and AD). […]
By Lois Burpee Eight years of boarding school and college menus, and four years of stretching the dollar-a-day budget, while sharing an apartment with a sister or friend in the depression years, were a culinary vacuum, with one exception. While at Wellesley College, I was introduced to Chinese food. A group of students who had […]
The precept that inspired the free press for several centuries was to make the comfortable less so, and to give hope to those lacking in comfort. It did this through commentary, ideas and opinions that swayed both “the readers and the leaders”. But what of the gardening press? Cultural tips, seasonal reminders, new cultivar descriptions […]
After closing our fiscal year at Burpee Seeds, I noticed some intriguing figures in the sales of flower and vegetable seeds to home gardeners that, while displaying great differences, also show affinities that would warm a compost heap. Politics, in my opinion, is not so much a contest between different states of red and blue as between different shades of green—a comforting reality in today’s frosty political climate.Lets’ first examine…
