Our gardens are in tatters, trees bent and shattered, branches broken in every corner. Where to start? What can be saved? A few days past I wrote on pruning, and for the minor breaks and splits in trees and shrubs I hope that this should prove to be a valuable resource. Today there are larger…
Category: landscaping
Do-it-yourself pruning guide for snow damage
The lawns in the neighborhood are reappearing, though my shady garden remains snow covered but for small areas exposed to the winter sun and beneath a few evergreens. On this sunny, nearly warm afternoon I toured the garden to take a closer look at the damage from the early February storm, the first I have…
The Spring Garden Show
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,…
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…
That’s the breaks
My short driveway is an asphalt valley between two tall snowcapped peaks. Beneath the thick snowy blanket are roses, nandinas, liriope, hollies, camellias, a fernspray cypress that is growing too wide for its proximity to the drive, and an old weeping theadleaf Japanese maple that encroaches on the drive by several feet. No doubt there are problems under…
… and again
In the early hours of this February snow six deer passed single file through the forest edge behind our home while my wife and I lunched on chicken soup and sandwiches, gazing out the kitchen window at the rapidly accumulating snowflakes. The last in this leisurely procession walked with a prominent limp, a result, I…
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…
Favored conifers
I thought there were more evergreens in the garden, but looking about on a cold winter afternoon I’m surprised by the openness, the lack of enclosure, even in a mature garden with dozens (perhaps too many dozens) of large trees and hundreds (yes hundreds!) of shrubs. This place is a jungle late April through early November. Then,…
Ramblin' through Dave's Garden 