Plants we love, hate, or just have something to say about.
My plants are happier without me
Like many, I’ve been working at home since March and, for the most part, enjoying it. But I do go to the office once in a while to pick up [...]
To lower the heat, let’s sit and talk in the shade of a big sugar maple
Rufus patrols the border. It’s hard to stay on top of runaway name-calling. Most of the tried and true insults now look like tread-bare bald tires, but [...]
Enabling annuals at Buffalo’s Erie Basin Marina trial gardens
There remains a certain snobbishness about annuals, partly because some perceive them as “common,” and partly because they’re, well, annual. (Many of us have seen the famous Plant Delights/Tony Avent [...]
Plant lust has come to this – 4 trips to 1 garden center in one day
Bob Hill returns after an epic shopping spree. Enchantment overtakes him. Few of us tillers of the soil plan on visiting the same [...]
The Gaura-Oenothera Connection – How Plants are Anointed with their Names
Collage by Mary Vaananen by Mary Vaananen. I am fascinated by the stories around the naming of plants. How is it that humans have come to know and [...]
Blackberry Winter and a Bucket of Blooms
Rose and Cooper—mother and son. “Time is not a movement, a flowing, a wind then, but is, rather, a kind of climate in which things are, and [...]
In Boise, Evelyn Hadden Grows Thickets for Wildlife
Like so many people these days, I've been catching up with old friends by phone - including former Ranter Evelyn Hadden in Boise, Idaho. She's a busy singer-songwriter and DJ [...]
Shade Gardening Around our Ping-Pong Arena
The Table Tennis Arena If COVID-19 wasn’t worrisome enough, we dodged tornadoes, scared off black vultures, and survived two nights of hard freezes this month. Gardening and Ping-Pong, [...]
Kentucky in April: Bloom-Binging Without Precaution
Dead Horse Gap in Prospect, KY. Rose and I are lying low in Salvisa, but we drive to Louisville once a week for grocery shopping at the Dirty [...]
Lingering Plants from a Long Gone Garden
We bought our first house in 1986. Not long afterwards, we met the neighbor from three doors down. His name was Ethan Becker. His grandmother and mother wrote the first [...]
What does “Rural Metro DC Area” even mean?
The latest in the on-going correspondence between Marianne Willburn and Scott Beuerlein. 6 March 2020 Lovettsville, VA Dear Scott, I am grateful to digital correspondence in that I cannot catch [...]
Preaching among the choir about native plants
Lurie Gardens, Chicago If one more person asks me if I have heard of or read books by Doug Tallamy, I’ll …. Well, I guess I won't really [...]