My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner is one of the books I routinely turn to on dreary days of winter when the temperature resists going higher than freezing. Here is what I had to say about the book back in 2002. “The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mudpies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.” I…
When Billie Holiday sang “There’s a change in the weather/There’s a change in the sea/So from now on there’ll be a change in me,” she was casting off an unsatisfactory love affair, not singing about climate change, but the words fit our current global concerns. The climate is changing and the sea is rising. No matter whether everyone agrees about the challenges ahead, there’ll be some changes made. As I stand here today meeting Janus, the Roman god…
The new year, 2017, has dawned. The blank pages of the calendar and the buried garden await the challenges and pleasures of the new year. All best wishes to all.
We just returned from a trip to Texas where our daughter Kate Lawn lives outside Houston with her family. Her family now includes three Eagle Scouts, dad and the two boys. Two years ago we visited and attended Anthony’s Honor Court; last Sunday we attended Drew’s Honor Court. We were so glad to celebrate their achievements. One of the elements of the ceremony was a slide show of Drew’s scouting years beginning as a Tiger Cub. We saw…
Not all garden books are how-to-garden books. Some books for fun are filled with weird and wonderful facts, and others are full of beauty and history. One book sent to me by Storey Publishing last month is Cattail Moonshine & Milkweed Medicine: The Curious Stories of 43 Amazing North American Native Plants ($19.95) written by Tammi Hartung. Because milkweed was in the title I began by reading those pages. When we lived in New York City I was…
Gardening is about more than tools and plants. It is about knowledge and information - because the tools and plants alone won’t take us very far. I am a reader, so I depend on garden magazines to keep me up to date. Gifts of information include membership in a society or subscription to a magazine is an easy gift to arrange and a beautiful and useful gift to receive. One magazine, The American Gardener, comes to me through…
For me most holiday gifts for the gardener fall into two main categories, functional and informational. Functional gifts include the necessary tools a gardener needs. We all start out with fairly inexpensive tools, partly because as a beginning gardener we don’t really know how hard a tool will have to work. As we grow as a gardener we come to recognize sturdiness and good quality and buy, or are given, better tools. I was wandering through the…
The view from the window shows that we had our first snowfall, just over an inch, but it didn't last long. Temperatures mostly ranged in the 30s and 40s. I guess I am done putting the garden to bed. Our first complete year in the new garden draws to a close leaving us with a sense of satisfaction - and a list of things to do next spring.
It was on a snowy December 6 in 2007, the feast of St. Nicholas, that I inaugurated my Commonweeder blog. On this anniversary I'm taking a look at the last nine years, on the blog, in the garden, and in my life. That first post gave a hint that I was not only a gardener but a reader. I mentioned Eleanor Perenyi's wonderful book Green Thoughts, and a chapter that talked about the house and garden that was…
Several years ago a friend asked me to give her advice about her garden which she said was out of control and too much work. When I visited I could see an immediate problem; her paths were too narrow. Wider paths would make it possible to walk through the garden side by side with a friend, and even provide better working space when it was time to weed or divide the collection of lovely perennials that comprised her…