Here's a guest post from James Roush, who hates mums as much or maybe even more than I do. James's blog is Garden Musings.—Eliz. My muse for today's blog is a coworker and friend who's also a new homeowner. She's faced with the dilemma of all non-gardeners who suddenly find themselves with a town lot whose previous owner seemed to [...]
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on October 17, 2010 at 5:00 am This post has 19 responses.
I and many in the industry believe that there are simply too many new plants introduced each year, with too few of them being proved garden worthy. Pity the poor gardener who, faced with an overwhelming choice of plants, can hardly know which are the best to choose. With...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on October 12, 2010 at 4:47 am This post has 22 responses.
Re Elizabeth's post below: I was very struck by this scene in an alley in Saratoga Springs, NY last Thanksgiving. Pansy seed that had obviously dropped from the window box above yielded a sweet row of blooms at a moment when the rest of the plant world was in...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on September 28, 2010 at 9:12 am This post has 5 responses.
Photo from the Icicle Pansy site. Every year, right around now, near the end of the gardening season, we northern gardeners are being tempted by racks of very pretty six-packs that go by the name of “icicle” or “winter” pansies. The legend goes that you plant these in the...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on September 28, 2010 at 5:00 am This post has 19 responses.
Roses can be depended upon to get high for me. It is getting harder and harder for me to find the plants that I need. It’s nobody’s fault, really. I have access to excellent garden centers, and they carry the hot new introductions as well as the usual suspects....
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on September 14, 2010 at 5:10 am This post has 9 responses.
Here is a guest post from Raffi, who runs the Gardenology plant encyclopedia. Puya alpestris I love going to botanical gardens at home and in my travels, always hoping to discover new plant gems that I might potentially add to my garden. No garden center can match the diversity...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on September 11, 2010 at 5:00 am This post has 24 responses.
A guest rant by Dee/Red Dirt Rambling Lagerstroemia indica Writing about gardening isn’t rocket science or even brain surgery, but it isn’t easy either. It’s not enough anymore to correctly identify a plant by its botanical, cultivar and common name. In the last decade, plant hybridizers and propagators began...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on September 7, 2010 at 5:00 am This post has 20 responses.
Late-summer border Greetings from Bavaria. I’m here to celebrate my favorite aunt’s 80th birthday and am having tremendous fun with the federation of cousins. But I did take the time to tour the gardens at Weihenstephan, which are on the site of a former abbey, as well as the...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on August 12, 2010 at 11:08 pm This post has 17 responses.
Hairy balls! Seeing these at the Botanical Gardens almost makes up for summer's passing. Surely this is one of the funniest seedhead plants. Gomphocarpus physocarpus or Asclepias physocarpus, take your pick. There are other common names too, but why bother.
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on August 3, 2010 at 10:40 am This post has 24 responses.
This is allium senescens. I bought it unlabeled at a plant sale four or five years ago and have since divided it up and placed it in every impossible spot in my yard–sunny spots in my super-sandy soil that are drained to a crisp by large trees. No complaints,...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on July 30, 2010 at 8:02 am This post has 17 responses.
You can't walk past my house now without being nearly knocked over by the scent of my 'Casablanca' lilies. I like to think I'm altering the mood here in Saratoga Springs, inspiring peace, love, and sex in all passersby.
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Posted by
Michele Owens on July 23, 2010 at 8:48 am This post has 12 responses.
Mike Shadrack calls this (and below) his “Octopus’s Garden in the Shade,” but he also refers to it as using hostas as alpines. Neither of these playful descriptions is quite correct—there’s no octopus and Shadrack lives perched above a creek, not on a mountaintop. All the same, I...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on July 15, 2010 at 5:00 am This post has 19 responses.
Here is a clump of self-seeded poppies in my vegetable garden last year: Spectacular, no? Here they are this year: Single is clearly a dominant trait, and they are losing their super-doubleness and reverting to singles. I plan on ruining the display by cutting the heads off of every...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on July 3, 2010 at 1:23 am This post has 11 responses.
Other People’s Perennial Borders Speaking as a mainly shrub+ground-cover kinda gardener who goes easy on the perennials because I find them to be more labor-intensive, I did a major double-take when writer Suzy Bales told me this perennial border in her Long Island garden is almost no work at...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on June 28, 2010 at 3:45 am This post has 26 responses.
After reading Michele's shrub posts yesterday and hearing Sydney Eddison plugging shrubs on the radio ("On Point", which also featured our Elizabeth) I have to weigh in because singing the praises of this important plant group is the centerpiece of my garden-coaching. It seems I'm always either urging people...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on May 29, 2010 at 4:11 am This post has 7 responses.
My PMPs, still a bit traumatized by shipping. What do you all think, now that they’re on the nursery shelves? I just received some of these from Proven Winners (as many garden writers have) and I’ve spoken to other gardeners who have recently planted them. No naysayers yet. The...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on May 25, 2010 at 10:00 am This post has 15 responses.
Buyers for nurseries and garden centers clearly have their ears attuned to all the trends we regularly discuss here. I can’t say I’m too thrilled about some of the manifestations of that awareness—“upside-down” vegetable gardens are now everywhere in the big boxes, and most of them are awful in...
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Posted by
Elizabeth Licata on May 18, 2010 at 10:00 am This post has 16 responses.
I am so not into pink. Or petunias. Or, for that matter, hanging baskets. And yet, here I am, assembling five hanging baskets to adorn our downtown. That's what owning a business will do to you. This is just a pilot project–an effort by a few community groups and...
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Posted by
Amy Stewart on May 12, 2010 at 5:36 am This post has 29 responses.
Last week, a woman who'd just moved to Saratoga Springs walked by my house and admired my tulips. "How many years do they last for you?" I shrugged. "I treat them as annuals and replace them with short dahlias as soon as they are done blooming." Her jaw dropped...
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Posted by
Michele Owens on April 30, 2010 at 9:19 am This post has 8 responses.
The brave garden writer Adrian Higgins does garden designers a big favor in today's WaPo – by dumping on the overused and misused azaleas now screaming from foundations all over the region. And while designers have to politely tiptoe around the subject, Higgins goes right for the jugular, before...
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Posted by
Susan Harris on April 22, 2010 at 1:31 pm This post has 30 responses.
