Book Review: Design Your Garden
Karen Designing a garden may be an overwhelming task and Diarmuid Garvin’s book,Design Your Garden, can be a great help. Whether you are starting from scratch or redoing an old garden…
Shakespeare’s Garden: Poison Hemlock
The poison hemlock, Conium maculatum, is an herbaceous biennial in the carrot family, Apiaceae that includes parsley and Queen Anne’s lace. It is not related to the evergreen, coniferous hemlock…
Plant Profile: Himalyan Lily (Cardiocrinum giganteum)
This giant lily is awesome but takes time and patience to realize its potential. Although a true lily it lacks the strap-like leaves of its relatives and has heart-shaped glossy…
Botanical Latin: Maculatus, a, um
Mac u LA tus; from Latin meaning spotted Many plants have spotted parts: flowers, stems, or leaves. Maculatus is most often used as a specific epithet but is also employed…
Plant Profile: Beautyberry (Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii ‘Profusion’)
This compact deciduous shrub has open arching branches and lanceolate leaves two to five inches long with long pointed tips. They are bronze-purple when young, dark green through most of…
Book Review: Contemporary Designers Own Gardens
Have you ever wondered what the garden of a famous garden designer’s garden looks like? Is it like the commissioned ones? Totally different? Or somewhere in between? Barbara Baker’s book,…
Plant Profile: Orange Golfball Tree (Buddleja globosa)
Endemic to forests in Chile and Argentina, this semi-evergreen, woody shrub is more hardy than other Buddlejas and losses its leaves only in the coldest winters. The dark green leaves…
Indian Inspired Flower Arrangement for Fall
While preparing for and Indian style dinner party I wandered in the garden looking for flowers and saw my marigold plants covered with flowers. I remember well the beautiful floral…
Plant Profile: Golden Angel’s Trumpet (Brugmansia aurea)
Native to central Columbia and Ecuador, where it grows on the slopes of the Andes, is an evergreen shrub or small tree. It is considered extinct in the wild but…
Book Review: Clondeglass: Creating a Garden Paradise
Dermont O’Neil, journalist, TV and radio personality, and gardener, takes the reader with him as he realizes his dream. As a child he had seen a walled garden that inspired…