We saw a lot of wonderful gardens during the 2014 Garden Bloggers’ Fling in Portland this past July. If I had to pick one favorite, however, it would be Rhone Street Gardens. This is a garden where it seems every square inch is bursting with exuberant plant life. The resident gardener at Rhone Street Gardens …
We stayed at a cabin on Loon Lake owned by our friends Bob and Wendy. There was a wonderful small dock jutting into the water, It was perfect for gazing at reflections in the water … Not to mention reading, stargazing, and listening to the loons. Judy really enjoyed hanging out on the dock. You …
Our week in Wisconsin was about more than just falling out of kayaks. It was also about enjoying the natural world. And we particularly enjoyed the natural world on the day we went hiking at the Hunt Hill Audubon Sanctuary, which was about 30 miles from our cabin. Hunt Hill has 400 acres of woods, …
OK, not wilderness really. But the Namekagon River in northern Wisconsin is part of an officially designated Scenic Riverway, so that’s kind of close. Little did we know that this river would test our wilderness survival skills (which is like testing our neurosurgery skills, as both are pretty limited). The plan was that Judy, Daniel, …
This will be my last post on Great Dixter. As I’ve already said, it was our favorite English garden. We liked it so much, in fact, that I felt compelled, almost against my will, to enjoy some of the topiary. But only because it was so very silly. This was in the Peacock Garden. It’s …
After swooning over the Long Border, the next area we walked through was the Orchard Garden and the High Garden. I’m treating them as a single unit for two reasons. First, I’m not completely sure which pictures were taken in which garden. And second, to me both gardens had the same sense of joyful anarchy. …
Time for more distraction from the snow. Here’s another installment about our visit to Great Dixter. Leaving the Sunken Garden with its pond, we walked through a stone arch toward the Wall Garden. An unexpected feature of the Wall Garden was the mosaic portrait of Christopher Lloyd’s two dachshunds, Dahlia and Canna. I like how …
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 …
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 …
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