Restoration Ecologists and Horticulturists Need To Work Together
I haven’t written for this site for quite a while, but today, nothing but a rant will do. In recent years I’ve become an enthusiastic advocate of incorporating ecology into [...]
Thomas Christopher, Ranter Emeritus
A Conversation with Dan Hinkley
A month ago I posted in this space about Daniel Hinkley, about his noted collector’s garden in Indianola, Washington, and his new book about it, Windcliff: A Story of People, [...]
On Dan Hinkley’s “Windcliff”
I don’t remember how old I was when my father helped me start a stamp collection. Maybe six? My father was a foreign news editor for Newsweek magazine and as [...]
A Home-Grown Alternative to Ipe
Black locust I’ve recently been contributing the text for a book about high-end landscapes in the Hamptons, that playground of the wealthy at the eastern tip of New [...]
Christine Cook Taught Me Dragonfly Gardening
In recent years I’ve learned to re-define “garden wildlife” to include not only butterflies and bees, but also the host of other pollinating insects. Recently, Christine Cook of Mossaics Ecological [...]
Native Plant Trust having Problems Sourcing Native Plants
For my podcast and radio program this week (they’ll post on Wednesday), I interviewed Uli Lorimer, the Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust. Uli first attracted attention as [...]
Sequestering for the Pandemic Brings Me Back to Basics
Sequestering has brought my focus back to life’s basics. Deprived of my usual distractions, suddenly I am keenly aware of and grateful for just the mere facts of comfortable shelter, [...]
A Gardener’s View of Pandemics
As a compulsive gardener, I’ve been accused of viewing everything through the context of plants. Still, in trying to understand the looming coronavirus pandemic, I’m finding it useful to think [...]
With Climate Change, Invasive Plant Problems Just Get Worse
“Fasten your horticultural seatbelts.” That was the gist of what Dr. Bethany Bradley told me when I interviewed her for my podcast last month. Dr. Bradley is an invasion ecologist [...]
Gardening for Climate Action
I’ve rarely been as deeply affected emotionally as I was this fall when I attended a pair of demonstrations by young people -- teenagers and pre-teens – calling for climate [...]
Companion Planting: Fraud vs. Facts
Sometimes common knowledge, what everybody knows to be true, just isn’t. That’s the case, I’ve found, with much of the broadly accepted information about companion planting. Do tomatoes really [...]
Assisted Migration of Native Plants
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a very interesting symposium, “Rooted in Place,” sponsored by the Berkshire Botanical Garden. The focus of the symposium was new trends in environmentally-based [...]