When I went to Greenfield yesterday to help set up the Greenfield Garden Club Annual Plant Sale and Extravaganza, I got to see some of the damage wrought by the terrible storm the other night. So many trees were taken down that clean up is not yet completed. Branches and whole trees are stacked by the roadsides waiting for removal. I was stunned to see this tree on Wildwood still leaning against the house. In spite of damage…
Amy Stewart over at Garden Rant posted about the reality of Meryl's Streep's garden in the new movie, It's Complicated. As the LA Times article said, this garden was not planted or tended in situ. It is a movie set. The plants for this 'potager' were grown in a greenhouse and laid out when it was time for the scene to be shot. Tomatoes were wired to the plants. Some people have complained that this fantasy of a…
“I guess you can see I like water,” Jane Markoski said as she gave me a tour through her gardens. There was a birdbath in the shady entry garden, a trickling fountain as you turned the corner of the house, a bubbling faux millstone fountain at the corner of the barn, a lotus tub in the middle of a mixed shrub and perennial border, a small fish pond with a waterfall, and a larger fish pond with a…
Kathy Puckett is a collector. She has hundreds of orchids and hundreds of daylilies. She has lilies and roses and peonies. But right now she is celebrating her Siberian irises. Blue, purple, yellow and white. Great clumps of healthy gorgeous plants. When I asked if she had a favorite flower family (it was obvious she could never choose a favorite individual flower) she hesitated. “I love them all for different reasons. Sometimes I love the flower, or…
A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King, But God be with the Clown-- Who ponders this tremendous scene-- This whole Experiment in Green-- As if it were his own! Emily Dickinson We had our moment of madness at Sunday's Rose Viewing, and I am not fool - or clown - enough to believe the roses are all my own. With the help of my friend and Dickinson scholar, Martha Ackmann, I…
Pam Oakes assures me that neither her house, nor the lush surrounding gardens existed in 1976. When she and her husband Gordon first walked this piece of land by a pond once used for harvesting ice, they could not even imagine where to place a house until a friend bulldozed a stand of sumac and said “Build here!” They did and she said it is a perfect site. The gardens grew and continue to grow. Oakes said…