Million Pollinator Garden Challenge

  • Post published:09/27/2015
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  Most of us know that pollinators are important. Without pollinators many of the ordinary foods we eat would not be available. We hear about Colony Collapse Disorder which affects honey bees, but there are thousands of other types of bee and many other insect and animal pollinators including bats. These pollinators are also dying. What to do? This past June the National Pollinator Garden Network (NPGN), an amazing collaboration of gardening and conservation organizations, launched the Million…

Bloom Day September 2015 – Here and There

  • Post published:09/15/2015
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Bloom Day in Heath Bloom Day in Heath has wild asters and cultivated asters and autumn is in full swing. The photo above shows a tangle of Japanese anemone 'Robustissima', annual cosmos and Achillea The Pearl. But there is more. I will let dependable the Thomas Affleck roses that are blooming less floriferously - The Fairy, the Meidelland roses, and Champlain, one of the Explorer roses.   I couldn't resist including this photo of a surprise foxglove -…

Made in the Shade Garden

  • Post published:09/12/2015
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Julie Abramson now lives with a graceful shade garden, but it was not always so. Like so many of us, Julie never had much interest in her mother’s garden when she was young, but over the years she has tended three very different gardens of her own. Her first garden in Albany was cheerful. “I was inexperienced, but this garden was very floriferous. I knew nothing about trees and shrubs,” she told me as we sat admiring her…

Autumnal Container Arrangements

  • Post published:09/05/2015
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  The Heath Fair is over. Facebook is full of photos of kids going off to college and kindergarten for the first time. You can hardly get into the supermarkets for the ranks of rigidly potted containers of mums by the doors. It must be fall. Time for an autumnal arrangement. Chrysanthemums are certainly the iconic autumnal plant, but other plants can also perk up our summer weary gardens or containers. I took a tour around the area…

Salvia ‘Hot Lips’

  • Post published:09/01/2015
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Salvia 'Hot Lips' seems to be a really hot plant this summer. Several of these flowers are in bloom on the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, and I have a couple blooming on my hellstrip in Greenfield. Visitors to  the Bridge have written and asked the name of this beautiful shrub. It took me a while to identify it because  I think of it as an annual and not a shrub. However, Monrovia Nursery calls it a…

Drought Tolerant Perennials

  • Post published:08/29/2015
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My drought tolerant perennials: Russian sage, cosmos, coneflowers, and phloxI need water loving plants, but I have not forgotten that many need drought tolerant perennials. Some gardeners have soil that drains quickly, and we all fret about summer months when no rain falls, or have periods of very hot weather of the kind we’ve enjoyed recently. Fortunately there is a long list of plants that do not mind long periods of hot and dry weather. Some of them…

Views from Two Windows

  • Post published:08/26/2015
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View from the Bedroom Window in HeathThe views from two windows show what we are leaving and where we are going. Over the past couple of years I have been documenting the view from our bedroom in Heath, marking the changes in the seasons. These photos of the  foreground view of the lawn gardens, the mid-ground view of the fields and the background view of the hills are what we have enjoyed living with, admiring and working with…

Everything Changes – Even the Garden Rules

  • Post published:08/21/2015
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River Birch tree bedEverything changes. Our whole life is changing, but there are smaller changes in the world, like changes  in cultivation rules, come to all gardeners with some regularity. We have been planting trees and shrubs in Greenfield and have followed new rules, and rubbed up against others unhappily. One old practice, if not a rule, about planting trees was that you could leave on the wire cage if it came with one, and that you could…

We have a winner!

  • Post published:08/19/2015
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We have a winner for Beardless Irises: A plant for every garden situation by Kevin C. Vaughn. Congratulations to Cathy over at Rambling in the Garden.

Last Chance for the Beardless Irises Giveaway

  • Post published:08/18/2015
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  Today is your last chance to leave a comment here to win this book, heavily illustrated with beautiful photographs of irises you never heard of. At least irises I never heard of. Beardless Irises  is by Kevin Vaughn who knows all about Siberian and Japanese irises and even Louisiana iriseswhich I am familiar with, but also Pacific Coast Irises which I can't grow, and the amazing tall, water-loving Spuria irises which  sound perfect for my new garden.…