On this Bloom Day it is clear I haven't spent as much time as usual on the Heath Garden. And yet, there are blooms like this tangle of phlox, coneflowers, Russian sage and cosmos. I can always count on cosmos to fill in. I'm trying not to capture the vigor of the weeds. Echinops There is also a tangle of Echinops down in a corner of the Sunken Garden which I often fail to mention. In all the…
I recently reviewed Beardless Irises: A plant for every garden situation and now Schiffer publishing is offering a Giveaway of this beautiful, fascinating and useful book. I have been reading Beardless Irises: A Plant for Every Garden Situation by Keven C. Vaughn and published by Schiffer. My own experience with beardless irises is with Siberian irises which are one of the most beautiful and easy care flowers in the world, and Japanese irises which often have a…
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…
The day after we planted all our water tolerant shrubs Greenfield was inundated by torrential rains. I was told over three inches of rain fell the afternoon and evening of July 7. We knew that our Greenfield house had a wet backyard and after planting nine shrubs we were fully aware of the heavy clay soil. However we did not expect several inches of standing water in the back half of the yard. Fortunately, our excellent plumber, Scott…
I don't usually get garden equipment to test, but I was happy that the Gilmour Hose Company thought of me as a tester. Gilmour sent me their gray Flexogen Premium Duty hose, guaranteed not to kink. We have been using the hose all summer at the Greenfield house, dragging it around the garden, around the house out to the hellstrip to water all the new plantings. While there have been a couple of heavy rains there have been…
My husband Henry and I stood outside the back of our new Greenfield house. We each clutched a different custom garden design prepared for us by Home Outside Julie Moir Messervy’s newest service to help homeowners create the garden they had always dreamed of. We looked at each other, we looked at the designs, and we looked at the blank green space that was our back yard. Both Home Outside plans used the information I had sent them. We…
I first became acquainted with Julie Moir Messervy through her book The Inward Garden: Creating a space of beauty and meaning. This beautiful book approaches garden design through seven archetypes, the cave the prairie, the mountain, the sea etc., and the way that a garden makes you feel. It is this attention to the mood I might want in my garden that interested me. That attention to mood might have begun when as a graduate student she spent…
On this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day I am celebrating blooms in two gardens, although I dearly hope it will not be too long before I am once again tending a single, small garden. In Greenfield the hydrangeas in the Shrub and Rose border are beginning to bloom even though they were planted only a month ago. Angel Blush is joined by Limelight and Firelight. These hydrangeas will form a beautiful privacy fence. Buttonbush was only planted two weeks…
One traditional roadside attraction is summer is chicory (Cichorium intybus) with sky blue flowers, sharing space here with the common orange daylily. Stunning combo. Of course, chicory is a pretty stunning roadside attraction all by itself. Mother Nature is no slouch when she plants a garden for the public.
As I begin planting new gardens in Greenfield, I have been reminiscing about the adventures we’ve had with gardens at the End of the Road. When we moved here in November of 1979 I must confess to having very little garden experience. In 1972-3 I had a very tiny vegetable garden at my Grinnell Street House. Then we moved to North Berwick, Maine and in the spring of 1975 I planted a large vegetable garden there. I…