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 […]

MIDSUMMER MIXES We’re proposing planting varieties both of edibles and ornamentals in a relatively tight space, so that “the lambs will lie down with lions”. Create a design for these midsummer, or hot climate cultivars of vegetables, herbs, perennials and shrubs, annuals and small fruit. They’re selected for their tidiness and harmony when planted “ensemble”. […]

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 […]

Named after ‘Impression Rising Sun’, a painting by Monet, impressionism revolutionized painting to an extent he neither anticipated nor welcomed. “I am in it (the movement) but I seldom see my colleagues . . . the little chapel has become a school that opens its doors to any hack.” A truly inspired and extremely rare […]

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…