Tovah Martin and Terrariums

  • Post published:05/21/2016
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Tovah Martin, gardener and author, has devoted a good part of her life to houseplants. Most of us have a limited view of what houseplants we might put on our windowsills, but when she found herself working at the wonderful Logee’s Greenhouse in Connecticut she fell in love with the hundreds of houseplant varieties put into her care. Over the years Martin has written books like Well-Clad Windowsills: Houseplants for Four Exposures, The Unexpected Houseplant: 220 Extraordinary Choices…

Augustine Henry – Plant Hunter

  • Post published:02/06/2016
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With all the attention being given to the importance of native plants in our domestic landscape, one can only wonder where all the non-natives, otherwise known as exotics, came from. If you look at plant names, sometimes including the full scientific name, you will get a hint. Many of the plants discovered in countries like China will have the name of the plant hunter included. Those who are familiar with Kerria with its sprays of golden pompoms may…

Ernest Henry Wilson – Chinese Wilson – Plant Hunter

  • Post published:02/04/2016
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  Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930) later known as Chinese Wilson, was British and as a young man he worked in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In 1898 James Veitch of the Veitch and Sons nursery asked Kew for a likely young man to send to China to find and bring back plants for the nursery. Wilson was recommended and chosen. For his first trip to China his assignment was to find and bring home seeds of the…

Made in the Shade Garden

  • Post published:09/12/2015
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Julie Abramson now lives with a graceful shade garden, but it was not always so. Like so many of us, Julie never had much interest in her mother’s garden when she was young, but over the years she has tended three very different gardens of her own. Her first garden in Albany was cheerful. “I was inexperienced, but this garden was very floriferous. I knew nothing about trees and shrubs,” she told me as we sat admiring her…

Franklin Land Trust Garden Tour – June 27

  • Post published:06/20/2015
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Ruah Donnelly’s house overlooks a wooded ravine, a tapestry of shades of green and shifting light. There is not a flower in sight. Donnelly says that over her years as a gardener she has experienced a growing struggle between wanting art in the garden and wanting to conserve the landscape. While she thinks conservation is winning the battle, any visitor to this garden and landscape will see no struggle, only beauty. Donnelly’s garden is only one of the…

Forbes Library Garden Tour – June 13, 2015

  • Post published:06/12/2015
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Virginia Rechtschaffen has always loved trees. She and her husband Rob even once owned a house in Belchertown that came complete with an orchard. Lots of trees. For the past 20 years she and Rob have lived in Northampton and accomplished something I would have thought impossible. Their in-town garden is embraced by a ring of large trees with a heart of sunshine at its center. How did they do it? Virginia said when they moved into the…

The Roses at the End of the Road – on Sale

  • Post published:12/05/2014
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The Roses at the End of the Road is a collection of essays written about our life at the End of the Road. We found our way to Heath in 1979 and located a tumbledown farmhouse at the end of a town road. My husband checked that fact many times. What people think is our driveway is nearly a quarter mile of town road, plowed and maintained by the town. After the big snowstorm in 1982 when the…

Susan Valentine – Translucent Flower Paintings

  • Post published:04/02/2014
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Before she began painting flowers Susan Valentine was a gardener. "Focusing on what each plant needs and what it produces if it gets what it needs was what I thought about most of my waking hours. Painting their portraits came very naturally out of that process," she said when I asked how she came to paint these translucent blossoms. Flowers have always been a popular subject for painters. They are varied in color and form - and they…

Peter Kukielski and the Sustainable Rose

  • Post published:03/27/2014
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The April 2014 issue of Fine Gardening magazine has an article by Peter Kukielski, former curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden titled Easy Picture Perfect Roses.  Peter knows all about 'Easy' roses because during his tenure at that garden he ripped out 200 or so of the roses in the garden that needed pesticides and fungicides to survive and then replaced them with 693 roses that did not need that kind…

Parsley, Eryngium and the American Horticultural Society

  • Post published:01/23/2014
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  One of the benefits of membership in the American Horticultural Society is the arrival of The American Gardener every other month. This month the cover photo was of an Eryngium or sea holly, and the amazing news that this is a relative of parsley. This isn't exactly one of  the weird and wonderful facts I love to collect, but I certainly found it unexpected. The delightful and informative article by Barbara Perry Lawton catalogs a number of…