Late winter garden shows are an interesting experience, particularly when you’re the one building the garden. We begin with an empty concrete floor Monday afternoon, and by Wednesday a garden appears that looks as if it’s been there for years. The photos below show the progression building Meadows Farms’ garden at the Capital Home and Garden Show in Chantilly,…
Category: Flowering plants
Only a few weeks away
Finally, I took a walk through the garden today, but it might be awhile until I try again. I’ve seen some grass through the melting snow on sunny properties, but mine is shaded from the afternoon winter sun, and the snow remains knee deep. I was exhausted from the effort of walking twenty steps. I…
Planning a garden pond
Every garden should have a pond! I have five, six if the wet weather, dirt bottom pond is included, and nothing in the garden, not the hellebores or irises, the mahonias or Japanese maples, provides greater enjoyment. Of course I started with one (as you most likely will), then on a whim added a second pond…
Today and tomorrow
Today there seems a need for a dose of optimism. One snow after the other has left a deep snowy blanket covering the garden, and spring seems so far away. In fact, the gardener’s spring is less than three weeks ahead. Gardener’s spring, of course, refers not to the seasons as determined by the path…
Here we go again
The snow is piling up …. again! And so, what else to do but relax with a good book, perhaps even a gardening book, or work on the spring seed order, or compile the list of perennials that can’t possibly be lived without. Today I have completed reading The Explorer’s Garden: Shrubs and Vines from…
And the winner is …..
The Perennial Plant Association has selected False Indigo, Baptisia australis as Perennial of the Year for 2010. This not a hot, newest introduction, but an old time, sturdy native. In my garden baptisia was set up for failure. The subsoil excavated to build my large swimming pond was mounded on the lower side of the…
Wild flowers
Beginning in late February with helleborus and snowdrops, then crocus and daffodil, dogwoods, redbud, and magnolia, through December with late autumn blooming camellias and mahonias, there are more flowers in this garden than I could possibly count. There are single daisies and double peonies, dainty blooms and monstrous hydrangeas, and flowers with amazing coloration and configurations. Some flowers are…
After the blizzard
Most traces of almost two feet of snow three weeks back have disappeared from the neighborhood. Except in my garden! A stand of mature trees bordering the southwest shades the property so that snow and ice linger for weeks after the rest of the world has thawed. The roots nestled below this thick white blanket…
Reflecting on a winter’s eve
Winter is the season for pondering, what could be, what can be? What happened, and where did I go wrong? (It’s a long story) My one acre garden has been expanding for more than twenty years, and is overflowing with common dogwoods and viburnums, redbuds, nandinas and hollies, lots of this, a few of that, and a…
A very good year
I’m generally not one to reminisce about the goings-on of the year past. Gardeners are well served possessing a short memory, better to forget the minor disasters that occur with regularity, but we mustn’t forget the why’s and why-not’s, the how-to’s that prevent complete failure. My wife will confirm that my memory is selective, the unpleasant or…
Merry berries
The garden is covered by a blanket of snow, but today the sun is shining and birds are darting to and fro. Our bird feeder has long been abandoned, a victim of relentless tree rats. No doubt there are feeders resistant to tree rats (okay, squirrels), but I’ve become satisfied to provide natural feed and…
The year in bloom – early spring
The drive has been shoveled, several times. Nearly two feet of snow have fallen today, and spring seems far away. Days such as this bring back wonderful memories, of the storm of ’66 when as a kid I delivered the morning newspaper, wading through chest high drifts. Later in the day jumping from the second…
Ramblin' through Dave's Garden 