Category: garden history

If there were to be a contest for the most sorely neglected culinary herb, lovage would certainly rank among the top five candidates. I first encountered this member of the parsley family two decades ago, not so much because I’d heard tales of its tastiness, but because I was curious to learn how a plant [...]

Sometimes I feel as if the lawn is the one calling the shots in my yard, not the other way round. That’s particularly true when I am pushing a mower in 95º heat, or paying an exorbitant electricity bill after a season of lawn irrigation. (Electricity, as I pump irrigation water from our old, 1852 [...]

I was watching the national news last night, and saw that the egg recall due to salmonella has been expanded to half a billion eggs. Think about it: half a billion. And the insidious thing this time is that the disease is contained inside the egg, transmitted directly to the yoke from the infected ovaries [...]

Few people realize that gardening is as much driven by current fashion as are most other aspects of popular culture. Take annuals for instance. You can hardly move about the nursery these days without bumping into some newly discovered or hybridized cultivar (often to the detriment of older varieties – just try for instance, finding [...]

The lilacs opened in my garden this morning, and as the breeze carried that heady scent through the open window for the first time this year, I was instantly transported back to my childhood in Milwaukee, walking with my mother to school on sunny May mornings past towering shrubs of redolent lilacs. Long forgotten details [...]

Spring has sprung here in Boston, and with the recent advent of warm weather, the phone is merrily ringing  (thankfully!) here in my office, with clients calling to set up design appointments, eager to get started with landscape renovations. And while enthusiasm is generally a highly commendable trait in the gardening game, there are times [...]

A chill wind blows through the cold and barren garden as I make my way back to the house amid small mounds of left-over ice and snow.  Here and there the tip of an occasional snowdrop can be seen trying to force its way upwards through the frozen earth; other than the evergreens, all seems [...]

I’ve been doing a considerable amount of research ahead of my 2010 national lecture tour, pulling together three new talks on “Greening the Victory Garden”, all about how to get started growing your own fresh food in an environmentally sensitive way. In the process, I came across this short video which I think you’ll enjoy. [...]

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a real holly bush. I was 14 years old, and my grandfather had taken me down from the wilds of cold Wisconsin to the considerably milder, and then to me, completely mystical land of central Illinois. There, basking in the late afternoon autumn sun, stood a shrub [...]

Oh boy, here’s a fabulous recipe. Amusingly, it comes from a French cookbook called “Recettes Fraicheur” that my friend Christina brought back from France this summer. (The title translates, loosely, “Light & Fresh Recipes”.) We both dusted off our French (or more precisely, Christina removed a few motes, and I inches of accumulation) and together [...]