In Defense of Inclusive Biodiversity
As a follow up to Elizabeth’s post last week remarking on the sorrowful tone of Margaret Renkl’s NYT article on non-native spring color, The AHS kindly allowed GardenRant to run [...]
Marianne Willburn
A New Master Recipe Cookbook for Foragers & Gardeners
Foraging season has begun. Perhaps you’re ready to give this new (old) trend a try, excited by a lecture or what seems to be the endless forest bathing lifestyle of [...]
The Bees Are Dead, The Goldfish Are Not, and It’s Okay.
It’s the first day of spring and the bees are dead. After a long yesterday assessing the winter garden hangover – the deer-nibbled evergreens, the chicken-uprooted polygonatum, the muddy mess [...]
Adventures in Eden Provides a Needed Dose of Travel and Inspiration
Botanical travel is an indulgence that passionate gardeners too easily deny ourselves. If funds become available, we are ever-aware of the needs of our own gardens at precisely the time [...]
Finding Your Crunchy Niche in a New Age of Homesteading
It’s a running joke amongst our friends that our place is the safe house for any type of future apocalyptic scenario. I’d like to believe that they just want to [...]
Windcliff: A book for passionate and playful gardeners
The very best books on my shelves suffer scribbles in their margins. Future book sellers will either be amused or dismayed by my vandalism, but I cannot stop myself (and [...]
United in Condemnation & Tonic: A Letter to the Midwest
21 February 2020 Lovettsville, VA Dear Scott, It is Sunday morning, everyone is fed, and there is still six inches of crusty, icy snow upon the ground. The will to [...]
New Book Gives Advice to Native Plant Lovers Battling Deer
Despite what you may have earnestly been told through grapevines that should know better, deer do not avoid native plants due to a convenient co-evolutionary agreement between flora and fauna. [...]
My Love Hate Relationship with Snow
There are few things more magical than a snowfall, and few terms more overused to describe it. Nonetheless, the cliché communicates the outright miracle of slowing a world that refuses [...]
Garden resolutions: The triumph of hope over experience.
The symbolic promise of a new year is not enough for me this time around. Normally happy to raise my glass and cheerfully throw out The Old as the clock [...]
Canna, hot greenhouse fantasies, and the brutality of ice. A Letter to the Midwest.
December 29, 2020 Lovettsville, VA Dear Scott, Well, I think we’ve established that you’re the better person at this point. As we will not agree about using shallow phrases [...]
The Pleasures and Perils of Young, Broke Gardens
To walk through a young garden in winter is a courageous act when the garden is your own, and the budget, diminutive. We forget how much frosting the active growing [...]