Air Travel: How The Hell Is This Our New Normal?
I returned to my garden this week worn out. After a long drive north to a speaking engagement, but an even longer flight and overnight experience south to a conference [...]
Marianne Willburn
A New Cookbook Saved My New Kitchen Garden This Year
This year marked my return to large-scale vegetable gardening after a three-year renovation project of my kitchen garden. However, due to a severe drought and only nine water barrels with [...]
Native Plants as a Moral Issue? Consider Me Chief Heretic.
It is summer and I am standing in a large field/garden of native plants. It is one of thousands just like it, and I have seen so many in the [...]
A Deeper Dive Into Drought
A late spring, early summer, when-will-it-end drought is currently making our lives miserable in many parts of Virginia. In my county we’ve ticked up to ‘severe drought’ status. This is [...]
Drought, Definitions, and Other Dilemmas: A Letter to The Midwest
Behind the posts, articles, conferences and social media, there’s a backstory. Have you kept up with the digital correspondence between Ranters Scott Beuerlein and Marianne Willburn? You can start here, [...]
Dry Humor Is One Thing, Dry Gardens Another: A Letter to The Midwest.
Behind posts, articles, conferences and social media, there’s a backstory. Have you kept up with the digital correspondence between Ranters Scott Beuerlein and Marianne Willburn? You can start here, or [...]
Screaming Yellow is Great for a Baptisia, But It’s a Terrible Color for a Parka
For better or worse, I thought I’d spend a moment ranting upon something petty in the garden that drives me absolutely insane, has done for years, and which will probably [...]
Vacation Is Important. Even For Gardeners.
Many years ago I wrote an article entitled “Beans or Beach?” – bemoaning the difficulty that serious gardeners have in leaving their gardens like normal people and taking vacations. “If [...]
Crocodiles & Mangroves: A Letter to The Midwest
Behind posts, articles, conferences and social media, there’s a backstory. Have you kept up with the digital correspondence between Ranters Scott Beuerlein and Marianne Willburn? You can start here, or [...]
Why Should We Think About Our Winter Gardens Right Now?
Few readers have an appetite for winter when spring is currently doing all the things that spring does in all of the ways spring does them. But for those who [...]
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Inbox: A Letter to The Midwest
Behind posts, articles, conferences and social media, there’s a backstory. Have you kept up with the digital correspondence between Ranters Scott Beuerlein and Marianne Willburn? You can start here, or [...]
A dirty word in gardening: Criticism
Today, or rather tonight (as I have let my day get away from me), I wanted to pick up on a discussion in the comments section of a post that [...]