After last week’s somewhat pedestrian thesis on mulch and mulching, we might as well get my obligations, two of them, over in the same month.
The subject of mulch is obligatory, I guess, for any garden writer, and I have on a number of occasions fulfilled my obligation in that regard, so, here in the post-dog days it is time again to reconsider the subject.
“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
With apologies to William Shakespeare:
There is a little bit of good in the worst of us,
Happy Independence Day. You remember, July 4 is the anniversary of when we sent the Brits home packing and set this nation up as a republic, just 243 years ago. Thursday will be a time for watermelon cuttings, picnics, fishing, swimming and other hot weather activities. Don’t forget the fire…
Here we are, just five days out of the summer solstice, and the days are already (minimally) getting shorter. Sure enough, summer is here at last, and the few people who thrive on horrible heat and stifling humidity are happy. Those who dote on cool breezes and crisp nights will just have to…
Yes, I know it is a bit after the fact, and yes, I know that the flowering of almost all azaleas has passed, but I can’t help but put in a word for a few kinds that flower at the end of spring, which doesn’t expire, astronomically, for two more days.
Even as daffodil season fades from memory, catalogs for fall bulb planting begin to arrive. There are a couple of reasons for that. The merchants want daffodils and other spring blooming bulbs to be fresh on your mind in hopes you will order soon and also because they would like to have orde…
What should be our plant of the month for May?
That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten;
You’ve heard before on this page about my considerable inefficiency at growing azaleas. We used to have an annual azalea pull every spring and roast weenies over the resulting funeral pyre of dead specimens.
It must have been some quarter of a century ago in April when I was driving down the hill on West Wood Street west of the court square. A patch of bright mauve (an oxymoron?) caught my eye in a front lawn. The grass was almost obliterated with little star-shaped flowers of pale blue or, more…
Never know how much I love you
A few days ago, I was standing in our front garden, smugly gazing upon the flushing green leaves of one of my favorite shrubs, a ‘Rose Creek’ abelia. Why smugly? Well, it was set new last fall and was actually still alive, for one thing. And for another, I knew the little plant had a whole s…
April was termed “the cruelest month” by the esteemed poet T.S. Eliot. He had been born in St. Louis, Mo., but moved to England in his 20s. So he had sufficient exposure to April from both sides of the Atlantic to make such an observation in his poem, “The Waste Land,” back in the 19th century.
Back in the day, it was almost unheard of for gardeners, of both the edible and ornamental variety, to get their plants into the ground any other way than direct seeding. Exceptions were cole crops, such as cabbage, and others started with sets, i.e. onions.
Tree Toppers International has started their robo calling, trying to induce suckers into paying good money for their services. They’re most into it on weekday and Saturday afternoons when it is too cold and wet to be outside. One of their representatives is a guy on television with a silly g…
Ah gets weary
“When I was a child I acted as a child.”
Catalog season is upon us. Even without the old Sears and Roebuck ones that thrilled us as kids, there are others (many others) that appeal to gardeners, even if for nothing more than comic relief.
Sharply shorn, shaven hedges;
If in January the sun much appear,
Here we are a full month past the solstice and almost that much after Christmas. Well, what to talk about? Christmas bloomers.
Yes, I know it’s some weeks after the fact, but today we’ll talk hollies.
Let’s talk flowers. Har de har har. In January, for crying out loud?
Old Janus has reared his ugly head again. The Roman god Janus had two faces, one seeing forward and the other back, as is apropos for the first month of the year. We’ve already looked back (last week) and so let us help Janus by looking toward the future.
This is the last one of these you will see this year. It is recap time and a time to look back.
Leslie Lewis led a discussion on moss and creating a moss terrarium at the Nov. 27 meeting of the Henry County Master Gardener’s Club.
’Twas the night before Christmas,
There’s no escaping it. Leaves must be dealt with some way or another this time of year. We’ve enjoyed them for eight months now, but after they are off the trees, it’s just another worry.
Our autumn colors are just going over. There’s scarcely reason to have any ornamental garden in October and November. Just drive through our countryside and view all the reds, yellows, bronzes, russets, and on ad infinitum.
You read here last week of the success of the Friends of the Library bulb sale fundraiser. Though not a municipal beautification project, per se, the effect is the same, in that a prettier town and county will be the result.
Pale amber sunlight falls across
You read it right. Cruelty is one of the salient assets of a No. 1 ornamental gardener.
Our several mixed borders at Tennessee Dixter have been, and are, a little off this year from past performances. I have been somewhat disappointed in them and have been reluctant to have garden visitors.
An infallible adage in the gardening world is “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another.” If it isn’t some relatively recent bane like mulberry weed, it is some hitherto unknown disease or plague of some kind or another that strikes just as we think we are getting ahead of the game.
Flowering ornamental trees and shrubs vary greatly in their value, or lack of it, the season long.
In the days of yore, so to speak, before I took up the garden column, I was outdoors editor, offering a weekly roundup of hunting and fishing activity in the upper Kentucky Lake region. Steve McCadams came along and far more than amply filled my shoes with the outdoors news about the time I …
In terms of signature identifiers, southern magnolias are to southern gardens what, say, lilacs or peonies, are to our Yankee friends. What would a traditional southern ornamental planting be without the magnificent Magnolia grandiflora, which is the botanical moniker with the common name so…
“Pursuit, not capture, is the heart of the hunt.”
The famous British gardener and colorist Gertrude Jekyll died five years before I was born, 1932 to wit. If her life had covered a century later, perhaps it might have been my good fortune to see her in person, via one of our four garden pilgrimages to the British Isles.
Volume 51, Number 1
No, this is not another column debasing daylilies. I have done that before, several times, and always got smeared by the many rabid fans of the “flower of a day.” This time, believe it or not, I will say something good for just about the most popular perennial in the country. It is probably …
Once in a blue moon I get a comment from a reader. It goes like this. Reader: “I read your column every week, and …” My rejoinder: “Good, that makes two of us.” (It used to be three before my mother died.)
It has been some years since we’ve talked here of ornamental pools as garden enhancement. While the subject is not of the first water of interest, there is enough of it to warrant an occasional mention.
It’s that time of year again. Not only do we have to deal with the August travails of chiggers, ticks, spider webs, heat, humidity, deer, moles, voles and other assorted and sundry curses, there’s also the dereliction that has begun to manifest itself in our ornamental and vegetable gardens.
August will rear its ugly head before we meet again. The month is indeed ugly, with soaring temperatures and stifling humidity. Summer, as it were, turns the corner. At the same time, it is a fat time, with burgeoning vegetable crops and flowers. It is an oxymoron, a paradox.
Summertime, and the living is... tough. Writer Henry James said “... Summer afternoon ... the two most beautiful words in the English language.” He must have been in the Canadian north woods. He was definitely not around here.
Outside of outright death, there are few things that exasperate an ornamental gardener more than some plant or other failing to flower. We’re not talking here of plants wherein flowering is secondary to attractive foliage (e.g. hostas and cannas et al) but those that are valued first and for…
The diatribe here last week on the paucity of flower in the May and June garden should have listed at least a few flowering shrubs and herbaceous things that, along with the foliage mentioned, offer a little relief from an otherwise derelict picture sans blasts of color.
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