My 800-mile trip to get a cheap greenhouse, and the neighbors who showed up for it
Maybe 20 years ago while visiting family in Mississippi I got word of a guy, somewhat of a local character, who had a greenhouse for sale. The guy, the story [...]
Bob Hill, Ranter Emeritus
Supreme Friends and a Pair of Witch Hazels
This is to connect our Southern Indiana farmhouse, built in 1860, to England’s famed RHS Garden Wisley, founded in 1878, to the legendary horticulturist Mike Dirr, his age doesn’t matter, [...]
The Little Daylily That Could
I know there is a children’s garden book here. Working title: “The Little Daylily That Could.” The based-on-a-true-life-tale would begin in a former Southern Indiana nursery where the owner, [...]
The AAA of Autumnal Adventure
If pushed to admit it, and without ranting too much, autumn is my favorite gardening season, maybe about two horticulture notches ahead of spring. It is a close call; [...]
Seed Sowing Success: Nature and The Odds
With plant seeds now being around for roughly 365 million years – beginning about the time life first crawled out of the ocean to give dry land a try—my steady [...]
The Robin’s Empty Nest
We all deal with empty nests at some point in our lives. In the world of robins, that book opens as they create their nests in stages requiring hundreds [...]
Wrapping Up 2020 at the Big Box Store
Bob Hill is back and overcome by impulse. Problem No. 1 was I left my reading glasses in the car. Problem No. 2 was I was out foraging box-store garden [...]
Plant lust has come to this – 4 trips to 1 garden center in one day
Bob Hill returns after an epic shopping spree. Enchantment overtakes him. Few of us tillers of the soil plan on visiting the same [...]
Finding the right place for new plants turns into a magical adventure
Mid-May planting fever. Eight already full acres and an old golf cart from which to explore. Where to put what? Again. There is no path least taken. They've all been [...]
Porch Postulating on 45 Years in One Garden
High on a Hill in Utica, Indiana A few very random thoughts while sitting in a screened-in back porch in Utica Indiana in early April of 2020 while [...]
On finding a cool plant – confessions of a box-store shopper
Curcuma at hidden hill below our Watering Can Man The curcuma plants were in black, plastic three-gallon containers near the entrance to a local box store, and not [...]
Right Plant, Right Place in my Garden of Low Expectations – the Junque Garden
The flowers – annuals and perennials and a few that hadn’t yet made up their minds which way to go – were stuck in a far corner of our greenhouse, [...]