The autumn colors of the yellow twig dogwood are very different from summer colors. Now the foliage is golden yellow, brilliant when the sun is shining on it. Though it is named "yellow TWIG" I have always found the yellow twigs to me are more chartreuse or lime when the winter sun is shining on it, but now the autumn colors of the foliage are definitely yellow and gold. We love this shrub because the shrub loves water…
If you have trees you will have leaves in the fall. When you start raking it can look like an endless job, with very little payback. Not true. The truth is that if you have a garden and trees you can have soil enriching compost. I harvest lots of leaves every fall. We have lovely neighbors on both sides of our garden and they both have trees. Our Northern neighbor has a beautiful giant maple right next to…
As I write this morning (Saturday, October 17) I am in my so-called office enjoying the view of my garden from the western window, and the lush asparagus fern hanging in the sunny southern window. In this part of the week I am usually trying to make sense of any notes I have written, or finding a whole new topic. Time is running out and I have a deadline. However, today I have a topic but having trouble…
Winterberry, Ilex verticillata, is clearly not a wildflower. It is a native plant that is known as a swamp plant which means it is very happy in our garden. It does not need full sun which is another blessing. The thing to remember is that winterberries are dioecious (separate male and female plants). Only fertilized female flowers will produce the attractive red berries that are the signature of the species. The white spring blossoms are very tiny and…
Saturday, October 3rd was an exciting day for tree lovers. Word had gone out from the Greenfield Tree Committee inviting people to join the tree planting party at Lunt Field starting at 8:30 a.m. My husband and I dawdled over our Saturday breakfast and then got in the car with bucket and spades. We arrived at 10 a.m. and realized that most of the work was done. How could this happen? When I spoke to Mary Chicoine after…
My flower gardening did not seriously begin until we moved to Heath and I began with roses. That might seem odd, but as we prepared to leave Manhattan in November of 1979 I read Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine S. White, who was married to E.B. White, one of my favorite authors. The first chapter is titled A Romp in the Catalogues. The artistic image that went along with that chapter is “Roses of Yesterday…
On this Garden Blogger's Bloom Day, a number of flowers like the Alma Potchke aster are beaten down by 24 hours of rain, often heavy rains. Even so we are enjoying Alma Potchke and other flowers and celebrating that much needed rain. I love the winterberries because they provide so much lasting color as other plants fade away and prepare for their winter sleep. The other two hydrangeas, Lime Light and Angel's Blush are also blooming - and…
Keith Gamage, fireman and gardener, gave me the inspiration I needed to finish the plan for our new garden in Greenfield. We had only lived in town for a year. While we did have some ideas about what we wanted, my husband and I hadn’t fully figured out how to arrange things. Gamage’s garden on the Greenfield Garden Club’s 2016 Garden Tour solved our problem. Gamage has a house and garden very similar in size to the house…
Louise Glück (pronounced Glick) who taught poetry for twenty years at Williams College in Williamstown Massachusetts was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. As it happens, my husband went to work at Williams in 1990 in the computer systems part of the Development Office, and not long after, I became the Librarian at the 1914 Library. That was a very special library filled with textbooks that financial aid students could use for their courses. Working in a…
Autumn gardens hold surprising shades of color. Right now we gardeners have slipped into autumn and are looking at the new aspects of our gardens. My roses are nearly finished, but there is still a color riot in the garden. Here is a list of the colorful blooms (and berries) that are blossoming right now and will continue well into October. First there are asters! I think the crowded blue blossoms with very fine foliage growing on the…