Hartley Magazine

All the latest news, hints, tips and advice from our experts

Written in United States

Heirloom Apples Tell a Story

‘Laxton’s Orange Pippin’, ‘Worcester Pearmain’, ‘Arthur Turner’, ‘Oxheart’ just a few of the named antique apple varieties that grew in my English garden. A neighbor gave the young trees to me when we arrived in the village; he’d grafted them from his own orchard trees, ones planted by his father when he returned to farming […]

Written in United States

Garden travels, past and present

A few years ago it was all about Millennials and how they travel to collect experiences, selecting destinations because of the stories they can later tell,  and prefer to acquire skills – like gardening — through hands-on learning. Like that’s something new? But if that’s the case, I’ve been a Millennial all my adult (Boomer) […]

Written in United States

New Directions in Garden Living

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 […]

Written in United States

Social Distance in the Garden

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 […]

Written in United States

Winter Gardening (and wool-gathering)

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 […]

Written in United States

African Violets: America’s Favorite Houseplant

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 […]

Written in United States

Urban Orchards: a rethink

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 […]

Written in United States

Cold Hardy Cactus: Opuntia with punch!

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, […]