Starting a New Garden at Age 80
There is still time and happiness. As we all know, good flower gardens take time. Hours. Days. Weeks. Seasons. Years. Lives. Add it up: Winter evenings bent over seed [...]
Bob Hill, Ranter Emeritus
My two gardening rants are both real and problematic
A – I had a big bunch of needy, gorgeous annuals and perennials sitting in plastic nursery pots in the back yard waiting further instructions. They were to be [...]
The Buried History of Daffodils, Daylilies and Naked Ladies
Even while enjoying spring flowers in our yards, we tend to think of them as just former temporary residents of box stores such as Lowes or Menards, the local nursery [...]
How the Callery (Bradford) pear became a damn good bad example
The Callery (Bradford) pear may be one of horticulture’s best example of a good idea gone very wrong. Could it happen again? Of course. Are there no other examples [...]
The upbeat midwinter fairy tale writing is on the wall
Mid-January is not a particularly good time for an angry, my David Austin roses died, “Give em’ hell” Garden Rant. Our fallen leaves in Indiana have barely begun to [...]
What a Christmas Tree Holds: Family, Memory and Time
What to make of our just-installed Christmas tree, and of memories carefully wrapped and stored away in cardboard boxes and plastic crates in a basement until dutifully hung on [...]
A new house and garden with Snow White and sheets of dreaded black landscape fabric
Fifty years on the farm and we are now in another great old house. Sturdy renovated and homey. Big rooms. Fine floors. Indoor plumbing. And only 98 years old, [...]
Pansy impulse control? Forget about it.
OK, it was Tuesday, March 11, 2025, on or about 2:27 p.m. on a very nice, sunny day in early spring. I had not purchased a single plant all [...]
A month of snow, ice, coughs, edicts, squirrels, birds and visions of blooms
So yeah, it's been a pretty shitty month with a foot of snow, an enduring icy landscape, California wildfires and dealing with RSV virus, which produces endless, metallic, lung-rattling coughs [...]
Death Comes to the Double Impatiens—Finally
Our annuals first arrive at our house every spring as garden visitors, then became guests, even friends. They form the backdrop, the understory, in many a fine landscape, including ours. [...]
Gardening and writing
It's all about filling a blank space, visualizing what can be, moving words or plants around, just shoving the familiar, the conscious mind out of the way and allowing [...]
A Fool’s April
The bubbling fountain came last, the watery finish to a wonderfully sunny day spent playing in the dirt. Sure, spring had officially arrived a few days earlier, but to me [...]