Category: ornamental gardening

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 [...]

I spent an idyllic weekend in far northern Vermont this past Memorial day, one afternoon of which was occupied in helping my friend Christina and her son Julian put in their vegetable garden. As part of the process, we stopped by a local nursery, where I was forced, FORCED, I tell you, to acquire several [...]

Several years ago my sister Cindy and I traveled to England. We passed a few delightful days in London, then went down to Dorset to spend a week at a small inn that specializes in garden tours. The setting was utterly charming, a 17th century thatched building nestled in a tiny village in the thick [...]

Gardening is a field in which patience generally yields high reward. Unfortunately for me, waiting has never been my strong suit; as a child of the electronic age, anything less than immediate gratification seems unendurably long. Strangely, my salvation outdoors has taken the form of benign neglect. Often I’ll plant something, then get called away [...]

By their very nature, gardens hold surprises.  Many are not so pleasant, like the about to flower clematis I discovered one morning last week cruelly carried off by a late frost. Most however, are delightful, especially when completely unexpected. Here’s one I thoroughly enjoyed today: Kalmia flowered deutzia, deutzia x kalmiiflora (or sometimes, kalmiifolia). I [...]

In many ways, I owe my gardening career to tall bearded iris. This may sound strange, but it’s true. These iris were my grandfather’s passion: he adored the plant, and as I adored my grandfather, it soon became clear that if I wanted to spend any type of quality time with the man, I had [...]

Part Two of an Occasional Series on Tips for Designing the Home Landscape There exists a curious phenomenon in our country found in few others around the world: The mania for the perfect, weed-free Great American Lawn. The word mania is apt, for this passion for wide swathes of unblemished grass is like a disease [...]