“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but do pay attention to it. In this time of pandemic, when even our commonest gestures must be made with care, my focus has been put into sharp detail on the treasure to be found in the smallest package. I begin with my grandson, turning seven months as I write […]
There was a time when no well-appointed garden was complete without greenhouse, fountain, a tastefully draped sculpture, a gazebo, and a bee bole. A what? A bee bole was a niche in a garden wall where the family bee skep overwintered. A what? A bee skep was a beehive made from straw bundles tied together […]
This Spring of self-isolation has been, for many people, myself included, unnervingly productive. So many missions accomplished: like sorting through old photo albums and hundreds of 35mm slides and waking memories of my first encounter with Hartley Botanic and their sturdy greenhouses. I recall how charmed I was by their display at the Chelsea Flower […]
Whatever the outcome of this current deadly disruption, corona virus has certainly focused many minds on the meaning of life–and on getting stuff done. Without the opportunity to procrastinate, tasks and projects in the Clarke household are being completed in record time; like clearing up the greenhouse, sorting the seed from the dust, the compost […]
The first full moon of 2020 fell on January 10. It was quite spectacular, like every full moon in the Southwest, from low desert to high plains, foothills to mountain tops. Sitting in my sunroom cum conservatory, peering out into the garden on a mild winter night, I was enchanted by the ethereal glow the silvery light […]
At the advent of solstice as I sit in my sunroom/conservatory, staring out over a snowy landscape that’s framed by a sapphire blue sky, with the sun beating down on the Rockies and the neighborhood buried under a foot of white fluffy stuff, thoughts turn to the coming year’s gardening: Will the Woodward junipers that […]
One of the attractions that’s fed the “influencer’s” fiendish passion for promoting houseplants is probably that, in general, it’s hard to kill one – a houseplant that is. Anywhere that you are comfortable, be it conservatory, greenhouse or light-filled room, so will be whatever pet plant(s) you nurture. Three years ago, I acquired a rubber-tree […]
It’s been an exceptional season for peaches; my battered old tree produced its juiciest crop of fat, red ‘Elberta’ peaches ever—at least the ones that survived the squirrels. Daily combat with these rogue rodents reminded me of the fruit trees I’d seen grown in conservatories in England, often as espaliers against a warm wall. Protected […]
Gardens are made of memory: of people, places, plants and all that nature offers us in such bounty that we do our best to hold it close in our personal spaces. This September, as I look out on my start-up prairie, formerly known as the front lawn, I remember a person who had more impact […]
Part of the delight in growing hardy cactus, for me anyway, comes in not having to move pot-grown specimens into the conservatory as the temperature drops. The hardy sorts of opuntia (aka prickly pear cactus) are especially attractive and common throughout the intermountain and prairie regions of the West. Opuntia aurea, hardy from Zone 5-10, […]
Every garden I’ve visited has taught me something new. Be it a tropical conservatory that reveals an exotic plant I’d never before seen, or a hard-working greenhouse that tutors me in a growing technique to raise better plants, it all makes for a smarter garden and gardener. For example, at Hunting Brook garden in Ireland, […]
Glasshouses have long been pivotal to advances in architectural engineering, marrying old traditions with the new technological advances. For example, The Palm House, the centerpiece of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew, opened in 1848 as a repository of the world’s plant diversity flooding in from all corners of the Empire and beyond. In 1851, Queen […]
