As we left the shore and I looked back at the beautiful, surreal landscape of Horseshoe Bay, it felt like all the worries and the cares of the world were also left behind to fade into the distance. The vast, placid waters worked their magic on me too, as they did on so many travelers throughout ... Views: 353
Some plants don’t benefit from being started indoors. There are a few reasons for this: their tender foliage has a hard time adjusting to the change of environment, their roots dislike being disturbed or their growth schedule is so accelerated that they outgrow their starting containers too ... Views: 347
Finding good companion planting is even more important when the plants are stuck together in a container. I watched the denizens of assorted pots fight for dominance many a time and more often than not one species brazenly asserts its rights over the sun, water and nutrients and ends up owning ... Views: 342
Everyone is familiar with this weird characteristic of mushrooms: they spring out of the ground overnight, fully grown, whenever they get a good rain and enough warmth to trigger their development. You go to sleep with a lawn and wake up to a mushroom hatchery.
The good news is that mushrooms ... Views: 342
There is nothing like a gentle facial to cleanse the skin and make it glow and there are plenty of ingredients in the kitchen cupboards for a nourishing face mask. Let’s go over a few classics.
Honey - it works by itself as a gentle exfoliator or it can be mixed with other ingredients like ... Views: 342
There is a time around the middle of July when the garden looks absolutely resplendent. It feels like every flower is in bloom, competing for attention. The late spring blooms haven’t faded yet and the some of the late summer ones decide to show up early, so there is a surreal mix of seasons ... Views: 341
If you want a real cottage garden, don’t tame it, it is supposed to be wild, messy and overgrown, sort of jumbled together without too much focus on height hierarchy and perfect color schemes.
Many of its traditional plants are tall, broad and thick and spill over railings, fences, trellises ... Views: 338
If you have established perennials, they are a readily available source of new plants for your garden.
Most herbaceous perennials can be propagated by division. In spring, for fall blooming perennials, and fall, for spring blooming perennials, dig up the clump, break it up into smaller ... Views: 338
There is something very sweet and nostalgic about this plant, with which I got acquainted in literary works before we met in real life.
What is it that I find so fascinating about heliotrope? I don't know. Maybe it's its deep purple flowers that glow like gems wrapped in dark foliage, maybe ... Views: 337
First chlorophyll breaks down and gets reabsorbed, allowing the other pigments to lend their colors to the foliage and turn it copper, red, yellow and orange. The tree sends a chemical called abscisic acid to the terminal buds, which shut down the flow of sap to the leaves, signaling them to ... Views: 336
How does one use freezing rain in a sentence without spoiling everyone's mood? I heard it, early in the morning, while it was still dark outside, the sound you can't mistake for anything else other than maybe sandblasting. Ice pellets. Nice!
With that the last of the annuals abandoned the ... Views: 335
The stonecrops are ghostly pale this fall and I'm not used to seeing them like that, normally they turn up rosy hues as soon as the middle of August; it must be the rain, they didn't have enough sunshine to start ripening.
Despite the wet weather the fall bloomers are right on time - the ... Views: 334
Ok, I know everybody is busy and strolling through your garden at night is not the first thing that comes to mind at the end of the day, but if the spirit moves you to create one, a moon garden can be just as lovely as a bright patch of colorful flowers in the sunlight.
As is the case with ... Views: 334
Tinctures preserve the active compounds of plants indefinitely, or at least long enough for one to feel that way. A good tincture should last for twenty years if stored in a cool dry place away from the sunlight. Tincture bottles are amber or dark blue on purpose, to keep out ultraviolet light ... Views: 333
Finding good companion planting is even more important when the plants are stuck together in a container. I watched the denizens of assorted pots fight for dominance many a time and more often than not one species brazenly asserts its rights over the sun, water and nutrients and ends up owning ... Views: 331
With temperatures stubbornly stuck in the eighties and nineties I would have missed the beginning of fall this year but for the garden following its own internal clock: warmth or no warmth, once we passed the fall equinox, everything in the flower and vegetable border went into liquidation ... Views: 330
I’m sitting on the balcony staring at my purple cherry pie plant, which looks happy as a clam basking in the sunshine in the company of butter yellow petunias. I don’t know why I haven’t tried heliotrope before, it’s an old fashioned cottage garden favorite and mine is a cottage garden.
Some ... Views: 326
I woke up this morning to a wispy snow flurry, the thin and icy kind that comes about when temperatures drop too low. Eighteen degrees, to be precise. It settled, unsure, in a thin, powdery layer that still lets the ground show through.
I almost hesitated to disturb the pristine cover when I ... Views: 325
The old garden roses are a proud tradition among rosarians, because they have a long history.
These are the roses cultivated before the creation of the first modern hybrids - the gallicas, the damasks, the albas and the centifolias and the mosses.
They have been immortalized in the ... Views: 325
Even though the three basic sun exposures are full sun, part sun and shade, the latter comes in so many variations, all with their own little quirks, that it deserves a full chapter all to itself.
Full sun exposure means eight hours or more of direct sunlight a day, without any large elements ... Views: 323
Some annuals are such reliable self-seeders they can pretty much hold their own with their perennial counterparts. They are usually wild meadow flowers, a little rugged but relentless in the propagation of their species.
I still find tall bell flowers from two years ago, blooming where I ... Views: 322
I read last year's entry entry for this week and got reminded of how remarkably consistent the weather and garden patterns are: the first snow, the January cold streak, the first bloom. They follow nature's implicit schedule almost to the day. It just dawned on me that I could read up a few ... Views: 322
I don’t think the goal of traveling is to see places and learn things, often you get better images and information from photography catalogs and travel guides. The goal of traveling is to get immersed in the spirit of a place.
The longer you stay in Greece, the more it becomes clear to you ... Views: 321
There is something I'm looking forward to this spring: I can't wait to find out if the two roses I started from cuttings last fall took root.
It's almost time to start caring for roses, now that the threat of killing freezes is over and before they come out of their dormancy. If you are ... Views: 321
Every spring I plan on planting more annuals and every summer I fall short of the desired effect. At least this year I have an excuse: after clearing up the shrubbery from a large portion of the front yard, the design of a new perennial border became a priority.
There seems to be a quiet ... Views: 320
Every summer I plan to thin the violets and every summer I change my mind at the last minute, and this picture is the reason why. How can I pull these delicate flowers that cover the earth in spring in every shade of blue between aqua and indigo?
Sweet violets are to the flower bed what ... Views: 320
What makes a beautiful perennial garden? There is no recipe or guarantee, but I can list a few things I noticed over the years that all thriving gardens have in common.
Work with the land you have
I know this ingredient can be supplanted by a simply unreasonable amount of work and earth ... Views: 320
My beautiful is preparing for winter and there's not much I can do about it so I'm starting next year's planning early.
There are never enough annuals or spring bulbs, so those are definitely on the list, especially for the new garden I started early this summer and which, with loving care, I ... Views: 318
Aromatics come in two flavors: kitchen herbs and medicinals. A few herbs cross over from one category to the other, rosemary and lavender would be good examples of that, although using lavender for cooking is a bit of an acquired taste.
Almost everybody has grown kitchen herbs on a sunny ... Views: 316
If you ever drove by a flower meadow in the middle of summer, you must have realized that plants handle themselves very well without human assistance, as they’ve always done. The gardener is only there to cheer them along.
A plant needs three things to thrive: sunlight, water and a proper ... Views: 316
Somebody who is fated to live a linear life can’t easily grasp the cycles of nature; I’m envious, almost, of the way the garden gets to reshuffle the deck at the end of each year and start fresh in spring, one level up from where it was before.
Sometimes this cycle skips like a record with a ... Views: 314
Both of the rose cuttings I started last fall have rooted, judging by the new growth, but I’m not taking the jars off of them until the weather turns really warm.
The roses are usually the first to get attention in my garden, before the spring cleaning or tending to the grass, so let’s talk ... Views: 314
If you ever watched a time lapse footage of a plant you can’t see the botanical world the same again. Nobody questions the fact that plants are living entities, but since their lives unfold at a speed so much slower than our own, one gets it intellectually, but rarely at gut level.
The most ... Views: 313
I don’t think the goal of traveling is to see places and learn things, often you get better images and information from photography catalogs and travel guides. The goal of traveling is to get immersed in the spirit of a place.
The longer you stay in Greece, the more it becomes clear to you ... Views: 312
Summer is knocking on the door a month early and it brought with it sweltering temperatures more suitable for the middle of July; it arrived so suddenly it gets difficult for us poor humans to adjust. Everything tripled in size in a matter of days, desperately springing into bloom as if not to ... Views: 311
Snow arrived, as promised, and blanketed a rather drab decor with a fresh coat of white. I’m bundled indoors, cozy next to the fireplace and a thick pile of flower catalogs: the summer bulbs are here.
What’s featured in the glossy pages? Gladioli, every breed of lily in existence and ... Views: 310
I know this is a task for October and not February, but since the weather turned sour and put the excitement for gardening activities on hold again, I thought I’d put together a list of interesting daffodil varieties to consider next fall.
Flower Drift is a double daffodil with pure white ... Views: 308
The fountain at the center of the garden was a staple of medieval landscape design. Its simple yet powerful symbolism was derived from necessity, but speaks to that part of the soul that envisions water as healing and life giving. Nowhere is a tiny fountain more at home than at the center of a ... Views: 308
Every year when I enjoy the abundant bloom and fragrance of my Miss Kim lilac I count myself lucky for my tendency to procrastinate. I put off pulling what looked like a dead shrub for an entire summer and fall, only to be surprised with blooming branches the following spring.
Lilacs are ... Views: 302
One of the myths of gardening is that once you planted a perennial border it is set in stone and it will come back, year after year, exactly the same. That is not true at all, I look through pictures of my garden through the last few seasons and it is almost unrecognizable from one year to the ... Views: 299
As we left the shore and I looked back at the beautiful, surreal landscape of Horseshoe Bay, it felt like all the worries and the cares of the world were also left behind to fade into the distance. The vast, placid waters worked their magic on me too, as they did on so many travelers throughout ... Views: 299
The plants got the message that winter is over. Every year this message comes in secret, in subtle ways that only plants seem to understand, but they all get it simultaneously and come back to life with a speed and enthusiasm that always humbles me, even after so many years of gardening.
This ... Views: 297
One of the perks of keeping a garden is stumbling upon little joyful moments when time stands still and life flows softly through, peaceful and unhurried.
Time slows down so we have enough of it to notice how bright the sunlight looks, reflected in the gold and orange leaves of the maple ... Views: 293
Some plants don’t benefit from being started indoors. There are a few reasons for this: their tender foliage has a hard time adjusting to the change of environment, their roots dislike being disturbed or their growth schedule is so accelerated that they outgrow their starting containers too ... Views: 289
The winter garden is a haven for the little creatures of the land; it provides them with shelter, food and cozy nooks to hibernate.
The gardener can lend a hand, goodness knows the wildlife can use all the help it can get during the coldest days of the year.
Add bird feeders to your backyard ... Views: 286
I always plant tulips. I’ve had beautiful ruffled pink ones, and fringed parrot ones, standard, double, lily flowering, you name it, I’ve tried them. I rarely see any in my garden.
They don’t like the soil or the light levels, or something, or maybe they get eaten over the winter, who knows? ... Views: 286
Finding good companion planting is even more important when the plants are stuck together in a container. I watched the denizens of assorted pots fight for dominance many a time and more often than not one species brazenly asserts its rights over the sun, water and nutrients and ends up owning ... Views: 278
It doesn't really look like spring in the garden until the spring cleaning is done. I rushed through it for a few hours between rains, so I didn't have a chance to pay close attention to the perennials that were already out.
The sprucing up attracted a few visitors from the wilderness - a ... Views: 278
The wild roses, the species and the rugosas, are what comes to mind when you think rose hips. Their fruits are large, in bright hues of red and bright orange, and their thorny shrubs provide them in abundance.
The best known species variety is the dog rose, an ancestor of the old garden ... Views: 276
Here’s to this year’s crop! I decided to try Independence Day tomatoes, and learned that it has a much lower germination rate than other varieties. Let’s hope they make up for it with taste.
The seedlings look sturdy and enthusiastic, and have grown large enough that I don’t have to worry ... Views: 272