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Dyeing Prayer Flags with Plants, and How I Found a Crafting Coach
The very day I wrote about Prayer Flags in my Garden, complaining that they only come in primary colors, a neighbor volunteered to help me, writing on Facebook: If I wanted to do this as a craft to...
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Next in Garden Flag-Making: Rit Dyes and Stencils
I last wrote about finding a crafting coach for my garden flags and trying natural dyes from vegetables for my DYI flags. I confessed that next, I’d be trying artificial dyes (the ubiquitous Rit)...
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Home-Canned Tomatoes: A Tantalizing Taste of Nature in Winter
Yellow pear and Black Krim varieties grew well in my garden last year. Both were delicious eaten fresh and also contributed their flavors to this winter’s stewed tomatoes. You may remember I’m an...
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Garden Flags with Shibori and Permanent Dye
The last time I posted about making garden flags you saw them dyed with Rit and then stenciled with acrylic paints. All 66 flags of them will hang in my front yard and screen my view of a parking lot....
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The Payoff
The tree form of serviceberry (likely Amelanchier ‘Autumn Brilliance’) lines a path. It has a graceful habit, early bloom, delicious edible berries that birds also love, and it’s drought-tolerant and...
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Designer Puts Tallamy’s Advice into Practice
New England-area garden designer Matthew Cunningham will be speaking in Silver Spring, Maryland for the local chapter of APLD on Saturday February 11 from 10 to noon. His topic: “Stone, Wood, &...
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Backyard Labyrinths Trending?
Labyrinths are on the rise, especially at schools and churches, but ones in home gardens like this will never catch on, I predict. That’s because it needs weekly careful mowing, plus frequent...
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Editing for Autumn
I’ve been spending a good deal of time recently at Wave Hill, the 28-acre horticultural paradise in the Bronx – I’ve been asked to write a book about its garden art. Wave Hill is famous for many...
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Buffalo’s first green roof, ten years later
The roof now Buffalo is not landscape architecture central. Aside from a large Olmsted park system (that’s been adulterated in spots), I find many WNY public landscapes uninspired. Private gardens are...
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Robert Frost Needed Better Neighbors
At Hidden Hill Nursery So maybe it was Robert Frost. That whole “Mending Wall’ thing: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper...
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I Found my Bird Feeder Bliss
For decades in a former garden, my bird-watching consisted of standing on my deck and pointing the trusty binocs at the bird houses in the wooded valley below. I can’t you what birds actually filled...
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A Glimpse of a Lunatic’s Garden
Jamie Dockery, wizard of farm and garden. August 12, 2017. I don’t know anyone on this planet, or galaxy, with more runaway enthusiasm for gardening than Jamie Dockery. And that’s not all. Besides his...
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Bulb-Planting Rules I Break
Who doesn’t love spring-blooming bulbs? I love all of them (well, except for hyacinths) and used to plant a large assortment every fall. Above are shots from my former garden, where I planted tulips,...
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Is Landscape Fabric EVER Not Horrible?
No holiday post from me – but I bet you’ve seen plenty lately and anyway, this post has been sitting in draft for ages. From video by Land Designs in Connecticut Because I watch so many gardening...
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Forsythias need to be free
By Barbara Eckstein via Creative Commons As much as I long for spring, there is one sight I am dreading. It’s the clipped hedges that were once beautiful spring-flowering shrubs, but now have become...
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Liberating Design Ideas from Great Dixter
Great Dixter’s most famous view, by UK Garden Photos I jumped at the chance to hear Fergus Garrett, head gardener at Great Dixter – undoubtedly England’s most famous garden – when the Horticultural...
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Making Gardens Safer from Ticks: No More Wildlife Gardening
I recently wrote about how gardeners freaked out about Lyme Disease are supposed to dress for gardening. It’s NOT a pretty picture and to prove that I’ll be posing for a shot of me in near-hazmat...
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Painted plants? It’s only Ok when I do it.
Orange spray-painted allium schubertii with purple angelonia It does seem a bit hypocritical. For years, we have consistently ranted or hosted guest rants decrying glittery silver poinsettias, blue...
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Eco-Landscaping at 2 Libraries – a Hit and a Miss
In my quest for examples of low-maintenance, more eco-friendly civic landscapes, two libraries near me were recommended by Scott Aker, head of gardens at the National Arboretum and a former resident of...
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Native Plants in Containers
I visited a fascinating native plants garden this past week, the Mount Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware. A botanical garden devoted to the native plants of Delaware’s Piedmont plateau, Mt. Cuba is...
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Autumn inspires a rash of whackadoodle…
Fall brings on the urge to clean up, but reconsider! I was reporting for jury duty, feeling anonymous in a pool of fellow citizens, when the court officer asked me how far back she could prune her...
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Campus Garden Teaches, Feeds, and Solves Runoff
This garden on the campus of the University of Maryland isn’t about prettifying the campus, though it IS an improvement. It’s about teaching students how to grow food, manage stormwater and help the...
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Holiday Decorating for the Irreligious and Talentless
I recently searched on YouTube for “Christmas decorations with natural materials” and found a bunch of crafty people in the U.S. and England. This confirmed my assessment that I’m not one of them....
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An Open Letter to Kim Kardashian
Dear Kim, I need your help. I am impressed that a reality television star, like you, with star status as big as the President’s (I mean HUGE), can walk into the White House and bend the President’s...
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History of Landscapes Starts with Stonehenge. Really.
As threatened promised, I’m blogging the History of Landscape course I’m taking at the University of Maryland, and here’s my first post. The (fabulous) teacher I’ll be quoting is Caren Yglesias....
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A world of meh (with notable exceptions): the midsize garden show
I did like this stacked stone circle from last year’s Plantasia. Garden installations crammed into windowless domes and convention centers in the middle of winter always feel so desperate to me. Maybe...
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How the Iconic Public Spaces of 4 European Cities Came to Be
My next report from the “History of Landscape” class I’m auditing at the University of Maryland covers something that landscape architects study but is off the radar for garden bloggers and their...
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Check-out line garden design? Ain’t happening!
Why not daylilies? They deserve daylilies. As soon as I see them pull out the cell phone I’m on my guard. Sometimes that angst ebbs when it is just a plant they’d like identified or a photo of...
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MoMa Rooftop Garden by Ken Smith – Crime of the Century?
Rooftop Garden, MOMA Location: New York,NY Architect: Ken Smith Landscape Architects. If this blog had only launched a couple of years earlier, you’d better believe we’d have ranted about the all-fake...
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How to Get Poison Ivy Off Your Skin and Avoid Getting it There in the First...
Anyone else gardening around poison ivy? How to Remove Poison Ivy Oil on your Skin I’ve been wondering what to do about the poison ivy in my garden, so clicked on this video about how to avoid the rash...
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Deer-Driven Container Re-Do
‘Standing Ovation’ Little Bluestem. Credit: North Creek Nurseries. Got deer? Then you relate to this sad before-and-after duo. I’d planted the red Iresine ‘Blazin’ Rose’ there before, with great...
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Easy Rain Gardens, Walk-in Tomato Cages and More from a Baltimore Master...
Robert Cook in rain garden, with elderberry. My post about a recent tour of Baltimore gardens omitted one because it was SO interesting, I wanted to go back and talk to the gardener another time, for...
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Butterfly Meadows and a Recycled Resource
I haven’t spent so much per ounce for plant material since I was a miscreant teenager decades ago. These three bags of seeds from Prairie Nursery in Westfield, Wisconsin, however, promise a...
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What’s the Point of Pergolas?
Pergolas in Daybreak, UT, outside Salt Lake City. A pergola in Maryland I saw way too much water-sucking landscaping when I was in Salt Lake City, but also some gorgeous pergolas in residential...
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Update on Replacing Perennial Bed with Turf, and the Public Reaction
Summer of 2019. Last year I wrote about the weedy mess of a perennial bed in front of my town’s most important historic building. In 1985. The space had originally been turfgrass, a continuation of the...
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Groundcovers: Grand to Aggressive
This black mondo brings attention to subtly variegated plants. Groundcovers are often suggested as solutions for sites where turfgrass won’t grow, or for places that are difficult to mow. As useful as...
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Rudbeckia Revolution
Be realistic, demand the impossible. Che Guevara I am waging war against frustration, and impatience is an obstacle. My struggle may take two or three years before there is a measurable outcome....
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Finally, a no-maintenance plant
But. Unsurprisingly, that is the opposite of what many gardeners want. After paying scant attention to this trend as talk of it reached me last year, I finally took the plunge and ordered 3 waxed...
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Visiting Daybreak, UT, a Planned Community
This is my third and last post about Salt Lake City, which I visited for the garden communicators annual conference in September. I live in a town that’s famous in planning circles – the “garden city”...
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On the Persistence of Sheared Shrubs
Azaleas as Mother Nature intended. I’ve held off ranting about the examples of sheared shrubs that I see in my town, but no more. Hey, I’m just agreeing with the experts. I Googled “shearing shrubs”...
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These “Inspiring” Gardens are Hilarious
Um, no it’s not! For some tension-releasing laughs (I’m getting tired of funny animal videos myself), I’m sharing some truly ridiculous gardens I found on a bogus gardening website of...
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Eco-Friendly, Low-Maintenance Gardening with Roy Diblik
During the lunch break Roy answered questions from gardeners, like Carole Galati here. Photo by Kathy Jentz. Way back (it seems) in February, I attended a popular winter event for DC-area gardeners –...
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A Very Rocky Obsession
Back when the gardening bug really hit me, we were raising two kids and watching our dollars. Or, at least watching the few we acquired being whisked off to creditors. We had no extra money around to...
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We Hired an Expert to Teach Coop Members to Prune their (damn) Hedges
Marianne made the case against HOA gardening rules, but my community has a different problem, dare I say a much bigger one? A New Deal project, my planned community included an unfortunate garden...
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Advice on When to Prune Shrubs – Mostly Wrong?
In a recent post I mentioned hiring an expert to teach my coop to prune their (damn) shrubs and linked to the pruning instruction that resulted. The shocker to me and most gardeners, I’m betting, is...
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Groundhogs in my Garden!
I suppose most suburban gardeners have some mammals to deal with in their garden – squirrels, rabbits and deer being the top nuisances in my area, so far. That is, until this fat-and-happy groundhog...
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Quick, Year-Round Color in the Garden – with Paint!
Before and after in less than a week! Taking me away from the horrors of my newsfeed this week has been transforming the look of my Greenbelt, Maryland rowhouse from its dull, 35-year-old grey vinyl to...
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Color Update with Paint, Plants and Wall Art
Thank you all for your many color suggestions for my front garden, in comments to this post. I love those colors, too! But I had to choose, and for an accent color against the house, including parts...
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Bird bath with running water ready when the birds are
UPDATE: This is not what I had in mind: In a recent post I used this photo of what I declared was my final design for the little nook out back. You know, “Ta-da!” Well, is there ever a “final” anything...
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A Rant Reader’s DIY Bird Bath
Terra cotta bird bath on a stump. Rant reader Dale Leeper posted the comment about his home-made bird bath in a comment to my bird bath story, and it sounded great to me. I emailed right away asking...
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