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, […]

The other day I strolled along a path between plants as tall as my shoulders, like a sea of green grasses with colorful swells of yellow coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, white ironweed and Indian plaintain, purple milkweed, and orange butterfly weed. Butterflies twinkled–monarchs, painted ladies, swallowtails—and bumblebees plodded from flower to flower. On the marsh […]

In the hottest July on record, you might expect me to be sweating about watering my plants enough so they can keep cool. But thunderstorms have been taking care of that. Instead, what I’m steamed about is winter hardiness. Brrrr! The issue of hardiness has been on display the summer in my hydrangeas. I have […]

In life and gardening, we all make mistakes—sometimes, even when we know better. My big mistake this year (so far) was buying cheap potting mix. I understand perfectly well how important the quality of potting mix is to container plants in greenhouses, in the house, and outdoors. I know that the mix must be light […]

I was out in the garden on a bright spring day, enjoying the fresh green of the unfolding fern fiddleheads, the yellow of daffodils, the white of the bloodroot and purple of the sharp-lobed hepatica in my wildflower garden, the unfolding leaves of the native wild ginger, when something seemed … wrong. My Spidey sense […]

It must be spring: I’ve put in my order for the local native plant sale. Over the past few years, I’ve been adding native plants to my garden whenever I can. Many, such as the woodland wildflowers I nurture in my shady garden, are lovely. Native plants also support native animals—from insects to birds and […]

This morning, as I waddled in my full-length puffy coat down the front walk amid the slabs of gray ice in my garden, I saw something amazing and heartening: the bud of a hellebore, trying to bloom under a dusting of snow. It’s a bold move for a flower, at 9 degrees F in early […]

As I write this, it’s 18 degrees below zero (F) where I live on the edge of Chicago, thanks to a nasty little twitch in the polar vortex. If you are someplace warmer and want to enjoy some schadenfreude about our near-record cold, you’ll find plenty of shivery photos here. Am I concerned about the […]

I’m always happy to get amaryllis bulbs as Christmas gifts. In January and February, when there’s not much a Midwesterner can do in the way of gardening, it’s a joy to have something to water. It’s even more joyful to see the first green sprouts. Paperwhite narcissus bulbs are another popular gift. So are bulb […]