Winter is settling in. The last roses, which lingered almost until Thanksgiving, have been blasted by a couple of cold nights. Trees are gray and bare, their colorful leaves fallen. The busyness of gardening, such a powerful balm and refuge in this difficult year, has come to an end. All is bare and still. But […]
My neighbor has set up a gigantic, animated witch balloon (Halloween decorating seems to have escalated this year). Meanwhile, I’ve set up a sprinkler. Deep in October, with the first hard freeze due any day, most people are done with gardening, apart from raking leaves. But I’m still busy with the hose. Why on earth? […]
Nights have gotten chilly. The news is scary. Winter is coming. But a garden is still a consolation, especially if it’s planned to keep blooming until the last possible moment. I dropped by the other day to say farewell to a friend who is moving far away from the home where she’s gardened for decades. […]
I was strolling (properly masked) through my neighborhood on a recent afternoon when I spotted a flower in a front-yard garden that swept me into one of those wave-of-memory moments. It was Gaillardia pulchella, the plant my mother grew up calling Indian blanket, its cheery red daisylike flowers rimmed with bright yellow. It threw me […]
There’s been a big boom in vegetable gardening this spring, as many people sheltering at home from the coronavirus have seized the moment. Some may have simply been desperate for something to do. For others, after a few scary weeks when food shortages seemed to threaten, it may feel safer to grow at least some […]
It’s always something, for a gardener. One year it’s drought, the next year it’s hail, another year it’s a new tomato blight. This year it’s a worldwide pandemic. But still, we garden. So we adapt. This year, some of us had trouble ordering the seeds we wanted. Sudden interest in gardening among involuntary stay-at-homes resulted […]
All over the world, antsy children are cooped up with anxious adults. It’s a scary world, all of a sudden. So grow something! Kids too! Starting a little garden of their own can give children a focus, something to care for, and a goal to wait for, besides the day they can go out for […]
When you move into your first house, you also move into your first garden. And for many people, that’s the scary part. If you’ve had so much as a bedroom of your own, you probably know how to shop for furniture (at least at Ikea) and how to paint a wall. But if you’ve never […]
I was trudging home from the drugstore on a sidewalk damp with melting snow under the weight of a February sky, and there they were: snowdrops. The flowers, not quite open, dangled from their delicate stalks above the gray mulch like little freshwater pearls. No long-stemmed rose in a florist’s shop can outshine a snowdrop. […]
I’ve been baking, as one does at this time of year, and got a whiff of vanilla: sweet, rich, flowery. Of course, it’s the scent of a flower. I had seen the yellow flowers of the vanilla orchid, Vanilla planifolia, just days before at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. The vine, with its broad, […]
There’s an Instagram-fueled boom in houseplants today, which means I’ve come back into fashion for a while. This tends to happen to me every few decades if I just keep doing what I’ve always done. I come from gardening people, who tend also to be houseplant people. Even in the middle of winter, we’ve always […]
The other day I almost picked a quince. It was an incidental quince: The Japanese flowering quince shrub it was growing on had been planted for stunning coral-and-white spring flowers, not for fruit. However, the plant hadn’t gotten that memo and had developed half a dozen substantial, apple-like fruits anyway. Unfortunately, the shrub wasn’t mine, […]
