Good-bye and Hello

  • Post published:07/22/2011
  • Post comments:3 Comments

It was good-bye to the daylilies at the End of the Road . . . and hello to airports in Hartford, Chicago ---------------- and Seattle!  Seattle Gardens are on the schedule for the next few day in the company of dozens of garden bloggers. Keep watching.

All About the Bridge of Flowers

  • Post published:07/20/2011
  • Post comments:5 Comments

The Queen of the Prairie looks more like the Queen of the River in this photo. She is attended by hundreds of handmaids and courtiers. As a member of the Bridge of Flowers committee many people ask me about when it is open and when is the 'best' bloom time.  Those questions are easy to answer. The Bridge of Flowers is open every day, all day from April 1 to October 30. There is no 'best' season. The…

Another Lawn-less Garden

  • Post published:05/17/2011
  • Post comments:9 Comments

Yesterday I attended a reunion of the book club I helped found in 1965. The book club continues, and the book under discussion was Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time.  I very much enjoy Petterson's books, and indeed many of the chilly books of the Scandinavian writers, but it is ironic that this book of lonliness and the failure of emotional ties was the topic among a group of women friends meeting over tea and cake…

Ominous Skies

  • Post published:04/08/2011
  • Post comments:4 Comments

During our  visit our son-in-law took us to view the playing fields,  the woodland trails and the new community garden that are a part of Sienna Plantation, where they live. There were no children on the playing fields, but we were stunned by the flock of buzzards enjoying their own game. In this case a dead armadillo.  There were over 50 buzzards near the dead animal which did not seem like a very good ratio, but maybe they…

The Corner in Katy

Cindy MCOK, lives in Katy which is is not far from Missouri City where my daughter lives. When I told Cindy we were coming to Texas she invited us, my husband, daughter and me, to visit her garden. I thought it would be fun to feature Cindy's garden on Three for Thursday which she started.  When we first made plans she said she thought the poppies would be in bloom. And they were!  We were still a distance…

More Than Plants

  • Post published:03/29/2011
  • Post comments:3 Comments

Our trip to Texas had many benefits. One of the first was meeting interesting people on the train ride down. Austrailian Tamma was on her  first trip trip to the United States, although she has travelled to many other countries over the years. She was our across-the-hall neighbor on the train and we got to spend lots of time visiting - and sharing meals. She said she is trying to 'eat American' but that it was hard. Americans…

Harvard’s Glass Flowers

  • Post published:02/19/2011
  • Post comments:4 Comments

While the northeast is blanketed in snow and ice, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amazing flowers made of glass are blooming at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In a darkened room on the third floor of the museum, glass cases sparkle, carefully lit to best show off grasses with their seed heads, delicate wildflowers, cocao plant and seed, one of the economically important plants on display, and more familiar flowers like rhododendron, mountain laurel, iris and dahlia. Each…

Amsonia hubrichtii – Perennial Plant of the Year

Last May I went on a fabulous tour of some of NYC's parks beginning with Battery Park.  There I saw Amsonia, which some bloggers had been raving about. I looked at this mass planting and did not see what all the raving was about. The flowers seemed inconsequential.  I was not impressed. Now I read that Amsonia hubrichtii has been named the Perennial Plant of the Year by the Perennial Plant Association. How could this be?  The PPA…

Thoreau’s Walden Pond on Muse Day

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Henry David Thoreau. I have long been an admirer of Thoreau. I remember a conversation with a friend of mine, then a student at NYU, about what Thoreau would think about returning to a simple…