I don't usually get garden equipment to test, but I was happy that the Gilmour Hose Company thought of me as a tester. Gilmour sent me their gray Flexogen Premium Duty hose, guaranteed not to kink. We have been using the hose all summer at the Greenfield house, dragging it around the garden, around the house out to the hellstrip to water all the new plantings. While there have been a couple of heavy rains there have been…
My husband Henry and I stood outside the back of our new Greenfield house. We each clutched a different custom garden design prepared for us by Home Outside Julie Moir Messervy’s newest service to help homeowners create the garden they had always dreamed of. We looked at each other, we looked at the designs, and we looked at the blank green space that was our back yard. Both Home Outside plans used the information I had sent them. We…
I first became acquainted with Julie Moir Messervy through her book The Inward Garden: Creating a space of beauty and meaning. This beautiful book approaches garden design through seven archetypes, the cave the prairie, the mountain, the sea etc., and the way that a garden makes you feel. It is this attention to the mood I might want in my garden that interested me. That attention to mood might have begun when as a graduate student she spent…
On this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day I am celebrating blooms in two gardens, although I dearly hope it will not be too long before I am once again tending a single, small garden. In Greenfield the hydrangeas in the Shrub and Rose border are beginning to bloom even though they were planted only a month ago. Angel Blush is joined by Limelight and Firelight. These hydrangeas will form a beautiful privacy fence. Buttonbush was only planted two weeks…
One traditional roadside attraction is summer is chicory (Cichorium intybus) with sky blue flowers, sharing space here with the common orange daylily. Stunning combo. Of course, chicory is a pretty stunning roadside attraction all by itself. Mother Nature is no slouch when she plants a garden for the public.
As I begin planting new gardens in Greenfield, I have been reminiscing about the adventures we’ve had with gardens at the End of the Road. When we moved here in November of 1979 I must confess to having very little garden experience. In 1972-3 I had a very tiny vegetable garden at my Grinnell Street House. Then we moved to North Berwick, Maine and in the spring of 1975 I planted a large vegetable garden there. I…
The Daylily Bank in Heath is coming into bloom. This solution to eliminating lawn mowing on the steep bank has been very successful. It was planted over the course of three years with daylilies mostly in shades of yellow and pink. The proper name for daylilies is Hemerocallis or 'Beautiful for a day.' I think this sunny yellow daylily is as beautiful as the day. I have taken a couple of daylilies down to the new house in…
I’ve learned a lot about weeds over the decades, but I was never given the ominous warning “one year of seed, seven years of weed” until last year. I think every novice gardener should be given a t-shirt with this bit of wisdom. On the other hand that bit of wisdom might be too discouraging for a beginner. The truth is that if you are a gardener, you will have weeds. All kinds of weeds, and all are…