“It is best just to accept what you have and not take from other people the things they have that you do not have …” — Jamaica Kincaid, “My Garden [Book],” 1999...
“There have been so many times since I have become a gardener that I have brought my family to the brink of bankruptcy just to have growing in my garden some tr...
“One day I was walking through the glasshouse area of Kew Gardens when I came upon the most beautiful hollyhock I had ever seen ... but when I looked at the lab...
“In the Park Seed catalog, I saw some beautiful portulaca. When I think of this little spready plant with short, yet succulent leaves and rose-like flowers, I t...
“[I]t wasn’t until I cracked open Eleanor Perenyi’s “Green Thoughts,” a tart, smart and beautifully written set of alphabetical essays ... that I realized how m...
“Evergreens don’t mix well with hardwoods, handsome though they are in avenues or in solitary splendor. Neither should they be spotted at hazard on a lawn. They...
“Weather is a force we have lost touch with. We feel entitled to dominate it, like everything else in the environment, and when we can’t are more panic-stricken...
“Any reader who picks up ‘Green Thoughts’ and begins to browse at random will perhaps entertain the thought that Eleanor Perenyi is highly opinionated, even pre...
“By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa and European species to Antarctica, w...
“[In July], the gardener finds that he ought again to loosen the baked and compact soil in the beds ... , and invariably he throws out of the ground an incredib...
An annual celebration of lavender may be winding down, but the lavender, itself, has other ideas.
Unseasonably cold spring weather, say local lavender farmers, ...
“To produce a new species, that is the secret dream of every passionate gardener!”
— Karel Capek, “The Gardener’s Year,” 1931
Although I would like to...
“I advise you sincerely that if you have in your garden a bit of a slope or a small terrace, make a rock garden there.” — Karel Capek, “The Gardener’s Year,” 19...
“In July, according to the immutable law of gardeners, roses are grafted.”
— Karel Čapek, “The Gardener’s Year,” 1931
Until I read this line in Czech author Ka...
“As punctual as an employee, I would leave home in the eight-thirty cold, almost always on my bicycle but sometimes on foot; after twenty minutes at most, I wou...
“For one enormous plane tree, in fact, with a whitish gnarled trunk, thicker than that of any other in the garden and, I believe, of the entire province, (Micol...
“The garden, or to be more precise, the vast park that surrounded the Finzi-Contini house before the war, and spread out almost 25 acres to the foot of the Mura...
Editor’s note: This is the final story in a series about women gardeners in the Rogue Valley.
“Perhaps the silver lining of Colony Collapse Disorder is its...
“Concealed were all thy beauties rare
’Neath the dark umbrageous shade,
But still to gain the loftiest spray,
Thy weak stem its efforts made;
Now, every obstacl...
“Whether moved by rivers, held in lakes and aquifers, or suspended in giant ice sheets, freshwater is a precious resource to revere and respect, not least o...
