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Garden Designer’s Roundtable: By the Sweat of Your Brow Will You Weed Your Bed.
My husband and I moved into our house in Burke, VA (Zone 7a) early in 2003 and immediately got to work on “letting the yard go” for about, oh, 4 years or so. I’m sure the neighborhood was horrified...
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Christoph Niemann’s “Bio Diversity”
Enjoy these amusing botanical images from Christoph Niemann’s wonderful book Abstract City. Niemann is an award-winning designer and illustrator, and this book is a compilation of creative little...
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Keep Writing, Keep Digging, Mr. Merwin
Yesterday the Library of Congress announced Natasha Tretheway, a Pulitzer-prize winner and professor at Emory University, as the new poet laureate. I’m not familiar with her writing, but I like that...
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Garden Designer’s Roundtable: Art and the Garden
Take a look at the pair of images below. What would you say they have in common? Left: “The Arch of Nero” by Thomas Cole Right: Photo by John Glover. Now, I’m pretty sure the garden vignette on the...
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“Now Entering the Xeric Hardpan Forest”
Recently I purchased and read Wildflowers and Plant Communities of the Southern Appalachians and Piedmont. Now, before you go labeling me as a mega-dweeb, you should know that plant communities are...
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David Culp’s Layered Garden Includes Black Walnuts!
More good news for those of us living with Juglans nigra! In his new book The Layered Garden, David Culp describes several genera that he has grown with success beneath these anti-social trees,...
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Is Designing Solo the Best Way?
Photo Credit: US Mission Geneva In the Final Comprehensive of my Landscape Design Course, we had to work in teams of three. I was in a group with two other talented people (both professional...
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“Malignant Magenta”
Some interesting revelations in a book I’m currently reading called One Writer’s Garden, which is about the Jackson, Mississippi garden of Eudora Welty and her mother Chestina. Last night I read this...
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Annie Dillard — Suburban Pilgrim
For years I have worshipped Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer-prize winning meditation on nature written back in the 1970’s. I keep a copy of it on my Kindle, and whenever the...
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This Land is My Land, All Mine!
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about what it means, as a gardener, to actually own my own piece of property. Sometimes when I am taking my vegetable scraps out to the compost heap, following a...
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