MORE meadows, pocket meadows, and prairie gardens

I've been immersing myself in learning more about meadow gardening (and prairie gardening) and naturalistic gardens as practiced by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury and others. It's not an unfamiliar topic for me, but I've having fun revisiting it.I'm doing a pocket native gardening program at the Cullowhee Native Plants Conference next week, so I'm wanting to be up to date.It's so interesting that...

Read More

The birdhouse gourd adventure

A 3-year old birdhouse gourd sprouts in the compost.Three years ago I thought it would be fun to grow a birdhouse gourd vine. They are not really edible so I'm not sure what my original motivation was. One of the vines did extremely well, scrambled into some nearby tree branches and grew to about twenty...

Read More

Mystery squash, easy basil, and fall vegetables

I've been down in the Piedmont for a couple of days -- for an evening hike at the Garden with a bunch of fabulous Summer Science Research high school students and a vet check-up for Woody (his partially-torn crucial ligament is being monitored -- happily, he's improving again).Thankfully, we've had enough periodic rain that everything looks good, even though the lakes nearby (Lake Hartwell) and the...

Read More

Maypop, a native butterfly & bee magnet

Passionvine, purple passion flower, maypop (Passiflora incarnata) is a beautiful perennial native vine with a wonderfully complex flower with crimped petal-like tepals. It dies back to the ground in the winter, but pops up in more places the next spring–in May usually.Like most gardeners, I love beautiful...

Read More

The first beans, tomatoes, and squash

I was a bit late in planting some of the summer vegetables, but they've flourished in the initially cool late spring and now hot early summer temperatures.Remarkably, I've harvested peppers and tomatilllos, usually a no-show until late summer.There are LOTS of tomatoes developing and the first ones close to harvesting.  Woo-hoo!  And the various vining squashes are looking good, too -- no...

Read More

Garden Writers: Who Are We Writing For and Why is it Important?

When I write about why I let some of my basil flower,who is listening?When we write online, who is reading and what are we trying to accomplish? Haven't you wondered, as your words fly off into the void of cyberspace, where your message will land? Will the readers even speak English; what type of gardening...

Read More

Natural gardening, meadows and informal perennial borders

Natural gardening to me means mimicking nature, recreating the way that natural processes result in the plant communities and successional habitats that we see, encouraging plant combinations that work, look and feel like natural places.  It's what I like to see at home. Meadow habitats are particularly...

Read More