book cover

June 30, 2008

fruit you definitely don’t eat

Filed Under annuals & perennials, hot p(l)ants, trees & shrubs | 6 Comments

FRUITING SEASON is beginning here in the perennial beds and shrubberies at A Way to Garden, but some of the early crop (like the red baneberry, Actaea rubra, above, a native woodlander) isn’t fit for eating…unless you’re a bird or mouse.

Read more

June 23, 2008

what’s cooking in your pots?

Filed Under annuals & perennials, hot p(l)ants, tools & techniques | 30 Comments

I AM DOING SOME SLIGHTLY LATE POT-PLANTING, piecing together plants gathered from here and there this spring into some impromptu designs I think I’ll like once they grow in. You? How about a show-and-tell?

Read more

June 16, 2008

10 thoughts on successful underplanting

Filed Under annuals & perennials, tools & techniques, trees & shrubs | 27 Comments

A COUPLE OF YOU COMMENTED when I posted a spring “walk in the garden” photo gallery, asking for help with the subject of underplanting trees and shrubs (including my oldest magnolia, above). True confession: I have come very slowly and painfully to this lesson, dragged by some much more talented friends, Glenn Withey and Charles Price of Seattle. The lessons have involved some yelling, and even some tears (mine, not theirs). Still interested in learning how to “think mosaic,” as I now call underplanting? Read more

June 11, 2008

‘bonfire,’ a begonia to believe in

Filed Under annuals & perennials, hot p(l)ants, houseplants | 20 Comments

I BELIEVE IN BEGONIAS for their cooperative spirit. Many possess an indoor-outdoor versatility, living happily with me (well, at least nobody’s said anything otherwise) in house and garden season to season. Even if I hadn’t been a Begonia Believer before, I would have converted instantly when I met ‘Bonfire’ (seen with a very old, very happy Javanese Buddha carved from volcanic rock, who seems even happier since ‘Bonfire’ moved in). Do you know ‘Bonfire?’

Read more