Month: January 2014
Sissinghurst in September, Part 2
After enjoying Sissinghurst’s Cottage Garden, we strolled on to the Nuttery. This is a word I was unfamiliar with, but it means a place where you grow nuts. A comical-sounding word, suggesting all sorts of bad puns. The Nuttery has a shady woodland feel, with its Ostrich Ferns (Matteucia strutheopteris) and rows of tall hazels …
Sissinghurst in September, Part 1
A day after seeing RHS Wisley, John and Pauline drove us to see Sissinghurst, the garden created in the 1930s by Vita Sackville-West. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have never read a single one of Sackville-West’s gardening books (or her novels, poems, or other writings for that matter). This, combined with the thousands of …
My Favorite Native Plant Catalogs
Oh, frabjous day! Callooh, callay! Sincerest apologies to Lewis Carroll, but I am very happy to have now in my possession the 2014 editions of my favorite catalogs for native plants, Prairie Nursery of Wisconsin and Prairie Moon of Minnesota. I am chortling in my joy. Prairie Moon has always struck me as the Moosewood …
RHS Wisley, Part 2
Here are some more pictures from RHS Wisley. I have to confess I had trouble remembering which pictures were from which part of the garden. I even printed out a map and tried to trace our route, but still ended up a little confused. I do remember that this is from Battleston Hill. At the …
RHS Wisley, Part 1
Wisley, I’m told, is the flagship garden of the Royal Horticultural Society. There are actually an amalgam of many gardens on its 240 acres. However, I could have spent the entire day swooning over the two ebullient mixed borders that seemed to go on forever, combining shrubs, perennials, grasses, and vines. Sometimes these borders seemed …
Here Comes Peter Cottontail. Beware!
Oh, the wages of indolence. Last year I wrapped my young trees in hardware cloth to protect them from rabbits and voles. This year, however, I got distracted by other things. And then it got so cold. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found much of the bark chewed off the lower trunk …
Scotney Castle
The first garden we saw outside of London was at Scotney Castle. Our friends John and Pauline drove us there after picking us up at the train station. Scotney Castle includes a one acre walled garden and a 19 acre park built around an old fortified manor house (Old Scotney Castle) and a pond. …
Our Paperwhite Narcissus is Blooming!
And the timing was excellent. They bloomed just in time for Judy’s return from a week-long trip. She was worried they would already be faded by the time she was back. Of course, she pointed out that I had failed to water the Narcissus as she had requested. They seem to have survived my neglect …
London Miscellany
No, I haven’t finished posting about our trip last September. For now, I’d like to share some photos and impressions of the few days we spent in London. This is an interesting city for walking. The weather tended to be overcast with occasional rain, but we didn’t let that discourage us. One destination was Millennium …
A Cool Garden on a Hot Day
So I found another couple of gardens from the Garden Bloggers Fling in San Francisco that I never did write about. One was the Palo Alto garden of Andrea and Andy Testa-Vought, designed by Bernard Trainor. Though very different from the kind of Midwest gardens I am used to, I admired how this garden created …
gardeninacity 