When your dreams are bigger than your budget, sometimes you must be willing to do the work yourself. I dreamt of a garden paradise dotted with ponds full of flora and fauna. That’s how we have found ourselves with the back-break task of installing ponds in our gardens. It’s a good thing I love to research, create plans, and boss people (my husband) around. My penchants have served me well in various garden projects like pond installation. I must warn that the hard labor and coordination of labor can take a toll on minds, bodies, and relationships. So, one must ask oneself if the end result is worth the collateral damage. Luckily, my priorities have…
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Before plants took over my life, I was obsessed with non-human animals. Of particular interest to me were birds. Whether I was tending to the birds on my shoulder at home or stalking birds in the wild, the moments of my life devoted to avian pursuits far outnumbered the non-avian ones. When I was a child, my father always put out bird feeders to attract the birds. As I learned more about gardening, I learned that you can cut out the middleman so to speak, by growing plants that are useful to birds. Since I was already an unabashed plant collector, it was obvious that I should start gathering plants useful to birds. I had…
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Ok, don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to vilify groundcovers. I’m just here to round out the story a bit in a way that my brain always craves. I seldom hear the whole truth about them. Most of the time, I just hear all the positive attributes; for example, they mimic natural ecosystems, suppress weeds, eliminate the need for mulch, yada, yada, yada. I am not here to contest that. I just need to blow off some steam because when I’m managing the groundcovers in beds with other precious plants, I often silently scream, “Why did no one tell me this,” and “It’d be quicker if I just rip all this out.” Joking aside,…
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Many of us have seen impressive, enormous agave specimens at botanic gardens. Their contribution to architectural interest is undeniable. Here on the East Coast, they also create a spectacle. They look like nothing else we are accustomed to seeing here. It’s no wonder many of us fall in love and succumb to a relationship with an agave. I didn’t think it through when we bought our first agaves about 8 years ago. They were small, cute, and not too tricky to manage if you could convince your more physically able partner to help you manipulate them. In the northeast, that means moving them at least twice a year with the seasons, not to mention re-potting.…
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“What’s this? There’s white things in the air!” sings Jack Skellington in wonder when seeing snow for the first time in the 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. While I can’t really recall, I like to think that my introduction to snow was met with the same sense of awe. That feeling never got old for me. It only intensified as I got older and became a harbinger of good things. Growing up in Northern Virginia, we lived in perpetual denial of the historical average snowfall of about 20 inches each year. That lack of planning for the snow meant that I learned to equate frozen precipitation with the high likelihood of school cancellations. That…
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Yes, that’s a dramatic title, but I’m not exaggerating. I’m a pretty intense person. It’s doubtful anyone ever used my name and “easygoing” in the same sentence. And gardening is incredibly important to me. When it was suddenly taken away from me in August 2022, it sent me into a tailspin. In August, we took a short trip to Maine. We did some whale watching (protip: natural remedies for seasickness may not actually work!), visited Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (which I’ll have to talk about later), and then planned to hike at Acadia National Park. Luckily, I managed to get through the first two activities physically intact. But almost as soon as we got to…