Rain gardens are created to collect storm water runoff from house roofs, parking lots and other places. By catching this dirty runoff the garden can help protect streams and lakes from pollutants like lawn fertilizers and pesticides, fluids that leak from cars, and other harmful substances that wash off roofs and paved areas. Rain gardens also filter water and recharge the local aquifer while the plantings in a rain garden support pollinators, birds, butterflies and many useful insects.…

By the time I learned about National Farmer's Market Week it was too late to celebrate with the rest of the nation, but it reminded me of the changes in the ways farmers now market their crops, and affect the economy of our communities. Agriculture has been important to our part of Massachusetts for decades. There were many dairy farms, but they were starting to close down when we moved to Heath in 1979. When we moved to…

Gardeners plant flower gardens in their backyards, but Mother Nature loves to plant flower gardens along the highways and by-ways. I am often surprised by how many flowers thrive in sandy soil and survive the salting of roads in winter. I drive around town and I see familiar flowers in Mother Nature’s gardens like orange daylilies, blue chicory and Queen Anne ’s lace. While I enjoy roadside gardens, it was Lady Bird Johnson who took the appeal and…

Using shrubs is one way to take up room in a garden, but it is also possible to have tall perennials serve the same function. I have several tall perennials in my garden that I realize are not well placed, partly because they are overcrowding each other. I will be reorganizing them in the fall. In the meantime I want to suggest some tall, dare I say statuesque, perennials that can make quite a statement in a flower…

Daylilies seem like a quintessential American flower, its orange blossoms blazing as they do along the edges of summer byways. And yet daylilies have an ancient history beginning in China about 5000 year ago. Chi Pai wrote a materia medica for Emperor Huang Ti dating back to 2697 B.C. when the flowers were more used medically than for ornament. By 1500 C.E. the daylily had travelled to Europe. In 1793 Linneaus, who introduced the binomial system of nomenclature,…

You never expect your perennials to proliferate when you are a young gardener You carefully plant your first perennial bee balm or Siberian iris or coral bells.  You set out your plants neatly and sigh with accomplishment and pleasure expecting that these perennials will look just as they do that day forever. After caring for flower gardens for the past 40 years you would think I had outgrown this daydream. But, alas, as I evaluate my Greenfield garden,…