Gardens are not made by sitting in the shade” Kipling said, and I must add that they are not made by looking at a plan, even one as beautiful as the custom design I am holding created by Home Outside. Gardens are made by thinking and digging, moving compost, planting and getting very dirty. Lots of skull work, and lots of muscle work. Let me recap our adventures of planting a whole new garden in Greenfield. We took…

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…

Carload of plants including divisions from Heath Garden to Greenfield Now that I have planted Greenfield hellstrip I can make the official announcement: we are the proud owners of a small house with a small yard in Greenfield. The house has garden space on the south side and a rectangular back yard, but there is only a small front yard plus a hellstrip, which a polite person might call a curbside garden. Once it is planted. The house…

The Amherst Historical Society is helping the Garden Club of Amherst celebrate their 100th anniversary - in its own way. The Amherst Historical Society will hold its Annual Garden Tour June 27 from 10:00-4:00.  Tickets are available at A.J. Hastings, Andrews Greenhouse, Amherst Books and Hadley Garden Center.  For more information click here. 100 YEARS!  In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the Garden Club of Amherst is holding a lecture by Roger Swain, the former host of PBS Victory Garden, Sunday June…

The Garden Tour Season is upon us! The entry garden above is one of the gardens on the 22nd Forbes Library Garden Tour which will be held on Saturday, June 13 from 10 am to 3 pm. Your ticket is a map of the six varied gardens on this self guided tour. Tickets are $15, but $20 the day of the tour, and are available at Forbes  Library and businesses like Bay State Perennial Farm and State Street…

I have always dreamed about having a cutting garden that would enable me to give out endless bouquets to all my friends. One good thing about a cutting garden is that it is not designed to look beautiful in any organized way. A cutting garden has no other design purpose except to give each plant room to breathe. That means flowers can be planted in rows without consideration of whether they will clash with the other flowers around…

Water is a precious resource. It is also a source of beauty in our gardens. We cannot all have water like this in our garden, but . . . we can have a circular fountain, and and we can have fountain and grotto pool in our back yard jungle, and and we can have a simple urn fountain, but we will probably never have a frogs with turtles fountain like this one in Seattle, Washington. What kind of…

With all the bad weather I’ve been happy to sit by the woodstove and read two new books from St. Lynn’s Press. Garden-pedia: An A to Z Guide to Gardening Terms by Paula Bennett and Maria Zampini ($16.95 paperback) is an excellent book for the novice gardener. There are so many terms that arise even in catalogs and other places that can confuse and confound. Writers and speakers may be trying to write or speak plainly, but sometimes…

Pines, firs, junipers, spruces and others are all conifers, cone-bearing evergreen trees. Within this large family there are many sizes, from low growing groundcovers, to very tall trees, with many types of foliage and many foliage colors from green to blue-green to gold. Evergreens like pines, firs and spruces have needles, while junipers, cedars and arborvitae have scalelike foliage. Recently I visited two friends with conifer collections. Both bought their plants locally at different nurseries so they could…

Rhododendrons are probably the largest group of broadleaf evergreens that are familiar to most of us. They can play a big part in adding substance and interest in the garden during the winter. I do confess it took me a while to understand the cigar roll shape those broad leaves take when the temperatures are very low, but I accept that even plants must protect themselves from the elements as best they can. Rhododendrons come in a whole…