Front yard filled with golden alexanders and serviceberries and elderberries and other virtue-signalling native pollinators and my friends here have chosen Rodgersia (compliments of China) and a snake plant (compliments of west Africa.) I plant a lot of non-natives/non-invasives I’m comfortable with, but this is a bit like cooking a […]
I think I’m making this post entirely because I’m in the mood to shop for hostas, feeling inspired having just picked up some for L (shopping for others is absolutely intoxicating.) I’m telling myself I am making this post as an excuse to take inventory, learn names of the ones […]
This gorgeous creature (below) showed up a couple of years ago under a random viburnum in a nowhere place in the yard, where no one would ever see it, and I told myself firmly that I would move it and of course I didn’t for two years. But this is […]
L. is interested in planting southern border of her back yard in Leeds. The area, conveniently located below a slightly terraced sloping lawn, has good baseline soil moisture and is relatively flat and stable. In our wooded grove, a small wooded hill of boulders and dense tree cover is constant […]
The kitchen garden needs to be redone – the asparagus patch was never built for easy maintenance, and so I never maintained it. It turns out asparagus doesn’t enjoy neglect, and I am moving it to behind the tomato bed. Also other stuff, like the raspberries, which have turned out […]
The 25-year-old snake plant/mother-in-law’s tongue/sansevieria has decided to put out a flower. I hear they smell lovely in bloom; guess we’ll find out. Nice end to the houseplant-focused season. In a month or so they will all be outside, or most of them, which is great because by March I’m […]
This is the first time she’s shown much of an interest in horticulture.
I’ve come to love using trees as anchoring points for developing new garden areas; a starting point to build from that a messy brain can latch on to and think, ‘Yes! A starting point.’ Planting under established trees is challenging. It’s far easier to buy a young tree, plant it, […]
When we moved here in 2012 I was drawn to a granite outcropping in the featureless center of the backyard. There is something appealing about massive, half-buried rock lying around like a geological shipwreck, and I wanted to “do something with it”. Inauspicious beginnings: (L-R above): November 2012, three […]