Lessons from a Portland Hellstrip
Garden touring season has given way to what I’m learning to treat as a second dormant period here in the high desert: the extreme heat of midsummer. And how convenient [...]
Evelyn Hadden, Ranter Emeritus
Nature Corridors Boost Failing Wildlife Populations
A buffer of plants on each side of an urban stream creates a corridor connecting habitat fragments, while penetrating the city with a source of purified air, welcome summer [...]
My Tale of Two Mulches
Which do you prefer on the garden floor: the varying texture of fallen leaves, or the fine-grained uniformity of wood chips? When I began making this new garden, I [...]
Saving Spiders
Short of learning to teleport them, this is my favorite method of moving spiders from indoors to outdoors. Last year, I was organizing my new home and found [...]
How I Spent My Second Spring in this New Garden
Spring is always a whirlwind. Here are some things I've been doing lately in my 2-year-old garden. Feeling grateful and extremely lucky that the previous owner of this land planted [...]
A Grower of Regionally Appropriate Plants is Hard to Find
On a recent drive through California, I stopped at the locally famous Sierra Azul Nursery, where I wandered through their 2-acre demonstration garden and met some Australians. “Nothing [...]
Patrick Cullina sees hope for urban design in the High Line
'Tis the season of garden seminars. Recently I participated in a thought-provoking one-day seminar on the theme of bringing nature into our cities. I spoke about hellstrip gardens, but a [...]
Can Winter Feed a Gardener’s Soul?
Not to beat Elizabeth’s dead horse, but I am still pondering winter interest — and not just in dazzling snow-covered landscapes that most of us couldn’t reproduce in our own [...]
Sounds of Silence in my Winter Garden
Mullein is one of my favorite plants to grow because it attracts seed-eating birds, including chickadees and downy woodpeckers, in winter. It also makes dramatic natural sculptures. Winter [...]
Snow in my Garden: Lessons in Perspective
Why is it that, after a snowfall, the landscape looks so much better, even if nothing has changed underneath? Snow offers the opportunity to view your garden with new perspective [...]
Laissez-faire Garden Design: A Long Conversation with Nature
Aster, switchgrass, and dahlia flourish in compacted clay under a dying sourwood that I can't quite bring myself to remove... yet. My style of gardening proceeds like an [...]
The Craze for Parklets
Image by San Francisco Planning Department. This year's international Park(ing) Day falls on September 19, a mere two weeks from now. On that day, individuals, groups, and businesses [...]