Tag: Prairie Smoke
The Garden Awakes
The weather has been warm for mid-March, but wet. The garden is waking, though most of it is still pretending to sleep. Some plants are hitting the snooze button, nestling under the fertile earth like a blanket. But among all the dead leaves and stems and the dormant plants, there are those who arise happily …
Tulipalooza and other May Flowers
Happy Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day! For those of you who don’t know, GBBD occurs on the 15th of every month, giving garden bloggers everywhere an opportunity to show off their best blooms of the moment. It is hosted by Carol of May Dreams Gardens. The timing of May’s GBBD is very fortuitous as it occurs …
Name My New Border!
All my beds and borders have names, though most are rather pedestrian. There’s the Sidewalk Border, the Driveway Border, the Patio Border, etc. The most evocative name I’ve come up with is the Left Bank Border, for the area north of the ‘Donald Wyman’ crabapple on the far side of the driveway. Now I have …
More Spring Cleanup and Foliage Day
More good progress on garden cleanup this weekend. Mostly on Saturday, which was cool and sunny. Sunday was cold (about 32 degrees F, or 0 C), so I didn’t put in as many hours outside. My biggest single cleanup accomplishment was digging out the containers planted with tulips. They had been buried in the cutting/herb/vegetable …
More Garden Space for Me!
So I have some exciting news! You may remember last October I wrote about how the city forestry crew had taken down a dying maple on the parkway west of the driveway. It turns out the city will NOT be replacing that tree (something about too close to the driveway). This creates a new space …
Fall Planting!
The Left Bank – the bed that lies west of the driveway between the crabapple and the sidewalk – has been born anew. The last three weeks I’ve hardly gotten into the garden at all, but yesterday I spent a good six hours digging out the old and planting the new. You may recall how …
Judy and Her New Camera at Lurie Garden
When we bought Judy’s last camera, about eight years ago, we were amazed by what it could do. It was a Nikon D40, her first digital SLR camera. We both tend to believe that any object that represents a major purchase should be kept until it is used up or no longer working (this explains …
Chicago’s Lurie Garden
After the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Lurie Garden should be the next must-see item on the agenda of any avid gardener visiting Chicago. It is a five acre garden in the heart of downtown, designed by Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel. Truly a garden in a city. The Lurie Garden has a prairie-style design, but …
Wildflower Wednesday: Starry Solomon’s Plume
Starry Solomon’s Plume is more properly known as Starry False Solomon’s Seal, but the people who write plant catalogues don’t like common names with “false”, it must drive down sales, so they came up with something with a more positive ring. I think they did right, because the other name implies that the plant is …
Another Plant Delivery, And Taming A Wild Raised Bed
Oh joy, another box of plants have arrived, this time from Bluestone Perennials. With a single exception, all of these are meant for in and around the raised bed at the west end of the parkway. This is an area that gets a lot of sun, and is seldom if ever watered for the simple …
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