I don't know how we got to July already this year, but here we are at Garden Blogger's Bloom Day on July 15, 2020. These two delphiniums are the last standing plants, helped a little bit by the wiggly stakes. If you are going to grow delphiniums you need stakes and pray for gentle rains, not torrents. That is a wonderful Lonicera, honeysuckle, behind the delphiniums. Here we are with three kinds of flower living happily with each…
The Greenfield Garden Club Garden Tour has been postponed to Sunday, July 12, 2020 due to the weather. Tickets and maps for the tour, $10, are available Sunday morning from 8:30am to 1 pm at the John Zon Community Center on Pleasant Street. Ten beautiful gardens will be on display. Hope to see you there with your masks. Social distancing required. The importance of pollinators in our own gardens, and in public gardens like those at the Energy…
The Garden Tour has been postponed to Sunday, July 12. It is almost time for the Greenfield Garden Club Garden Tour. My garden is one of ten that will be on display. My garden has roses, just beginning to enjoy their second blooming. I wish I could tell the Fairy rose buds from those that need to be deadheaded. I love daylilies because they have such a long bloom season. I have daylilies with lots of different colors…
WRITING WILD by Kathryn Aalto Writing Wild is the thrilling and inviting title of Kathryn Aalto’s book about 25 Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (Timber Press $24.95). She begins with Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of poet William Wordsworth, who succinctly described herself as a “mountaineer, diarist, poet.” This first section sets up the design of the book. First there is a bit of unexpected (in many cases) biography focusing in some…
Just in this past week my daylilies have begun to bloom. Years and years ago I never paid attention to daylilies, which I never seemed to even notice beyond roadside orange daylilies. But daylilies have an amazing history and have gotten more various and beautiful over the last hundred years. Daylilies originated in Asia over 400 years ago; the orange daylilies we all recognize. Then they started travelling through Europe beginning in the 1800s. They even made their…
The only roses I remember as a child, was the prickery rose bush near my grandparent’s house in Vermont. It did not hold much interest for me except that I thought it might be a place visited by fairies. Occasionally I would leave a tiny gift, but I never did see any fairies. Even so, I did not lose my belief that there are magical creatures in the world. When I was a young teenager in Connecticut I…
At our house we make use of three different composting techniques. We have two black bins for kitchen scraps and weeds, wire bins for leaves, and a compost pile for weeds and pruning trimmings. These three ways of making compost provide different ways of improving our soil. Most of us are familiar with the black compost bins. I take a pot of vegetable scraps out every day. However it takes more than just those scraps and weeds. It…
On this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, most of my bloomers are roses, but this sage plant is right outside the back door and I love it! I'll never use that much sage, but it is beautiful. Zaide is one of my favorite roses. I appreciate that it was more than 30 years ago that the German Kordes hybridizers were making sturdy disease resistant roses that would not need insecticides. They were way ahead of the US in creating…
It is not difficult to find flowers for every season. Many spring flowers have decided it is time to take a nap until next April. If it weren’t for the fact that summer bloomers were beginning to show their colors I’d be very depressed. Like many of us my spring garden began with bulb flowers like scillas, crocuses, daffodils and tulips of every sort. In my May garden fringed bleeding hearts and a goldheart bleeding heart showed their…
Echinacea otherwise known as coneflower is a wonderful perennial. It is a sturdy plant. Echinacea purpurea is ideal for bees because they see those landing strips (petals) and right on to the nectar and pollen. There are many many new Echinacea varieties, but if you want to attract and feed the bees, simpler flowers are more beneficial. Behind the Echinacea in the photo above you can see a blossom of the Eryngium, sea holly, which looks spiky but…