Plants we love, hate, or just have something to say about.
This might be Creme Upstar, though not double enough. Nothing lasts forever. Beauty is fleeting. You’re heard these hackneyed sayings many times. But maybe this year they’re worth [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Bob Hill returns after an epic shopping spree. Enchantment overtakes him. Few of us tillers of the soil plan on visiting the same [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
