The sun has broken out, the snow is melting on the garden paths and I am thinking warm thoughts to hurry it all along. Among them I recall sitting with Rosemary Verey in her grotto cum conservatory on a cool English spring day, which leads to memories of the many women I’ve worked with, learned […]

Living in a house built in 1958, the design of which borrows heavily from California architect, Cliff May, I am only too aware that a glasshouse structure suited to mid-century modern style needs to be spare in form and more committed to defining architectural space than serving as a decorative ornament. Having gone through several […]

Some years ago I wrote a book titled The Art of the Kitchen Garden about the evolution of fruit and vegetable growing and cookery from the 15th to the 18th century. Greenhouses evolved in part, I learned, from the introduction in the 17th century to Europe of the exotic pineapple, which quickly went from oddity […]

These days, more than ever, words matter. And in the realm of this column I got to wondering about the meaning of conservatory, which is more complex, it turns out, than the one for greenhouse. The latter is pretty much self-explanatory, a house where green things grow. But on turning to my copy of the […]

As I write this in the days before Thanksgiving, snow is falling steadily in the Rockies. It was 60 degrees yesterday, so I had an energetic day, washing windows (the better to see the snow!) and hauling the lawn furniture indoors. In these days of indoor/outdoor blurring, where the conservatory is another room of the […]

Stained glass windows have been around a good deal longer than conservatories, yet it would seem that the two have something to offer each other. Wafting around the National Botanic Garden of Ireland in September, I was fulfilling a bucket list item; I’d long known about but never visited the graceful Curvilinear Range and its […]

Phillip Johnson’s “Glasshouse” in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of the icons of mid-century modern architecture. Steel-framed and glass-walled (hence its popular name) it seamlessly blends indoors and outdoors. It’s sophisticated simplicity has been the pattern for much early-21st century design. The photograph below, from my book, The Midcentury Modern Landscape,  shows a Johnson-inspired modernist […]

Mulch: the magic M-word that every gardener should know and practice, in the garden and even in the conservatory. Why mulch? Some may think that mulch is just cosmetic, improving the looks of a garden. That it does, but it’s main attraction is far more complex­­—and interactive set of attributes that keep the garden looking […]

“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow” is an old adage loaded with meaning, but one with special significance, I think, for us gardeners, knowing as we do that every garden begins with a seed. Seed can be “seed money” that lets us purchase a plot of land or rent space in a community garden. Seed […]

Who watched the Royal Wedding? Who felt a tear in their eye as we learned that Meghan Markle’s simple-bunch bouquet contained flowers that were favorites of Princess Diana, picked – and here’s the kicker – in the castle garden by Prince Harry? Now that is saying something! Flowers have long had all sorts of symbolic […]

Gardening in the steppes of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region is a constantly rising learning curve. I dream of a garden-enclosing greenhouse along the lines of the Eden Project, or maybe a dome like the one at the fabulously revived Des Moines Botanical Center. May has been a particularly trying month, with an endless […]