At Hartley Botanic we have a good relationship with many knowledgeable garden writers both in the UK and USA – here you can enjoy reading their articles and gardening tips.
Winters in the southwest are at best variable to say the least. It may be the cold season, but weeks of warm, spring-like warm weather can’t fool us, we know it suddenly change overnight to unseemly arctic conditions. That’s the moment we gardeners swap the spade for a snow shovel, or possibly a broom since […]
Even though I added an entire truckload of horse manure, several lawn-tractor cart loads of seaweed, and so many wheelbarrow loads of compost that my body ached from moving it, the peppers, tomatoes, and other fruiting plants in my garden had less than ideal yields this year. The lower-than-normal harvest of tomatoes especially suggested that […]
As the year draws to a close, we garden writers begin receiving notices about the fresh trends for the garden in the coming year. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s list of all that is new for the New Year arrived yesterday. For nearly 200 years the PHS, as it is commonly known, shared its top 10 […]
 Before you put this little book away Please promise me that will never say: “You should have seen my garden yesterday.”  It’s been my good fortune to visit a great many gardens in my career as an author of books about garden design, history and, well, gardening in general. In so doing, I have also […]
As described in a previous blog post, I built a large hoop house down the length of a pair of the raised beds in my garden, enabling me to significantly extend my outdoor growing season. All summer long the hoop house frames have been left uncovered while daytime temperatures remained in the 70s and 80s. […]
A most impressive display in your greenhouse might be this scarlet Balsam. Unfortunately the photographs cannot convey the brilliancy of flower colour, a wonderful day-glow in the flesh, and with this variety enhanced emerging from deep purple-green foliage. The Balsams or Impatiens family offer many excellent choices for inexpensive impact; easy to grow, continuous flowering […]
Silly gardener! Summer goes, And winter comes with pinching toes, When in the garden bare and brown You must lay your barrow down. So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden of Verses, where youth (the child) admonishes an older person (the gardener) to lay aside their chores and woes, and play while the […]
Growing your own fruit trees is quite different from growing vegetables and flowers in a greenhouse or outdoors. For one thing, there’s much more waiting involved. That’s because most people who buy a fruit tree at a nursery or garden center pick a young one that will fit in their car, or if they purchase […]
Have you ever considered growing vegetables under lights during winter? It’s an excellent way to extend your current growing season or to get an early start on next spring. But before you decide to invest in creating a winter growing system under lights, some basic information about plants and light will help. Plants depend on […]
“This morning, when I went to look at my flowers…I saw again in my mind all the blossoms in the woods, the fields, the gardens, the orangeries and the green-houses; and I thought of all that we owe to world of marvels which the bees visit.”  Maurice Maeterlinck, 1909. Not just the bees, I hasten […]
This spring was quite wet, which made it ideal for producing berries. I grow a variety of berry plants, all of which keep on giving year after year. Not wanting to make jams or jellies during the heat of summer, many of my berries are bagged and frozen to be used in cooler weather. Here’s […]
What can be more magical than a full moon on a summer evening? That great silvery orb peeping out behind drifting clouds or rising regally into a clear sky twinkling with diamonds. Makes one wax lyrical. Sitting out in the garden on such a night could be called moon-bathing, and provide an opportunity to enjoy […]
