It’s that time of year again. The umpteenth generation of house finches is leaving the nest, one by one, encouraged by their parents to fly the coop; it’s getting crowded in the Mexican tin lantern that is the couple’s poquito ranchito. It’s a wonderful thing to witness as each baby bird gains confidence and control […]
Considering all of humanity’s endeavors for which clever workarounds have been invented…like “smart” phones, thermostats, search engines, algorithms, whatever we can open with the touch of fingertips on keyboards, I feel justified in thinking of gardening as the last hands-on enterprise left to us. Okay, I exaggerate, but just a tiny bit. Think about it: […]
May! At LAST! And all craziness in the garden has broken loose. The mantra in the Rockies is not to plant anything before May 14, or Mother’s Day, whichever is latest. This is, however, a newer rule. Consulting my trusty volume, How to have Good Gardens in the Sunshine States, published in 1957, the author, […]
Spring burst upon the scene this month, and was I ever glad to see it, as was just about everyone else I know in my part of the southwest, i.e. from the Rockies south thru the Sangre de Cristo mountains to Albuquerque. We had the errant snowfall…like it lost its way then dropped a desultory […]
There is never a perfect time to have knee replacement surgery…or any surgery for that matter. However, for this gardener, May 1, 2024, was exactly the wrong time since it erased for all practical purposes an entire gardening year. Even now, as I write this, my right knee is complaining after just a brief totter […]
“By the Light, of the Silvery Moon” was top of the charts in the early 1900s; a vaudeville standard that young lovers crooned to each other…given the chance, which was often taken beneath a full moon to the gentle strum of a ukelele echoing across a garden’s shrubbery depth, accompanied by a girlish giggle and […]
As my garden in Colorado has matured, so have I, and the post-Christmas lull and polar vortex winter has given me thinking time, a chance to identify “improvements” in the aid of slow and low maintenance, and to read a book or five, including Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands, a book […]
This month is filled with memories, no matter how you observe the holiday season. For me, Christmas meant spending a week in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin at my grandmother’s home, where my Dad was born and grew up a small house on N. 63rd St. Food was the main feature: Grandma was a stunning cook in the […]
Oddly enough, in my neck of the woods, the dead of winter is one of the busiest times in my garden year. Sheltering in my ersatz greenhouse aka sunroom, when the snow is lying heavy on the ground (19 inches heavy, and even heavier further south, while I won’t mention Wyoming), I have all the […]
“If you can read a book, you can do anything.” Short of embroidering it on a cushion, that’s a mantra I’ve lived by since my best friend in high school wised me up. I’ve packed in a lot of reading since then, researching the history of garden design and landscaping for the books I’ve written, […]
There was an unforeseen delay in my getting this letter written – the peaches on my elderly tree were ripe and the weather was due to change overnight from 90° and bluebird skies to 55° and sodden grey. Welcome to the Front Range. With the right kind of greenhouse this wouldn’t be a problem: the […]
In a corner of England, long, long ago, a young woman with visions of the epic garden she was planting, sowed seeds of milk thistle, Silybum marianum. HUGE mistake! Little did I know (yes, moi) that the enchanting, fresh young foliage, shimmering with silvered veins in the Norfolk sunshine, would age to old boot leathers […]
