What To Do in May and June Avid gardeners find lots to do during May and June as spring melts into summer. The enjoyment of spending time outside watching things grow and listening to the birds can distract us from our spring to-do list. But taking care of business early in the season will result in a more attractive garden and more success through the summer months ahead. The days are getting noticeably longer and warmer as the first flush...
The Living Fence Gardening is the art of domesticating the wild, of creating living geometry within our landscapes. Order, symmetry, lines, and boundaries please the eye and soothe the spirit. We are inclined to organize and define our spaces by dividing them up into smaller pieces we can manage, to protect them within walls and behind gates. We contain what is ours, setting aside sacred space, our own ‘paradise,’ from the wider world. We exclude the unwanted wildness living...
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other word would smell as sweet.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet v. Q2 1599 What is in a name? How does naming a thing affect its destiny and how later generations will view it? The story of how a popular native holly came by its name, and how that name destroyed a promising Colonial American industry, demonstrates that names have incredible power to shape the future....
“I use only native plants, native to the planet Earth. I am using indigenous plants; they are indigenous to this part of the universe.” Bill Mollison, Founder and Director of The Permaculture Institute In the Beginning… Let’s begin with the obvious: we live within an ever-changing ecosystem. Europeans came to North America more than four centuries ago, cutting trees, planting fields, building homes and roads. Native Americans also cut trees, built homes, planted fields, hunted, and lived...
Bins of papery brown bulbs appear in every garden center and big box store right after the back-to-school displays disappear for another autumn. I love to study the photos of bright spring flowers on the bins, bags, and boxes of bulbs. They invite the ultimate impulse purchase. “Where to plant them?” you may wonder. No matter, you’ll find a spot. As trees turn gold and scarlet, we feel the chill in the air, and know that the long summer...
The Long Story of Tea in America Have you ever wondered where your tea comes from? Tea is one of those everyday things that we can always find at the grocery or convenience store. You may remember that tea was imported to Boston in the Colonial era. Maybe you also remember the story of how colonists, dressed as Native Americans, dumped the British East India Company’s cargo of tea into the Boston Harbor in December 1773 to protest unfairly...
A Mystery and A Memory We found several large evergreen shrubs in our new yard that we couldn’t immediately identify, when we moved here over a decade ago. We could pick out the boxwood and Camellias, but we were especially curious about the very tall, open shrubs that the birds loved the most. It was August, and tiny bluish gray drupes were ripening along this shrub’s woody stems. Its leaves were fragrant. Birds gathered in its dense and twiggy...
Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium and More That pile of wet grounds left from your fresh pot of coffee contains nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and iron. Does that list of ingredients sound familiar? You may recognize this nutrient list from the last bag of fertilizer you read. Brewed coffee grounds, the dried and ground remains of the coffee bean, which is a seed, can be repurposed to enrich compost and improve soils. Grounds may contain up to 10% nitrogen, intended...
“Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?” Dr. Carlos Castaneda When a young graduate student in anthropology wanted to learn more about the medicinal uses of plants for his academic research in the early 1960s, so the legend goes, he sought out an old Mexican native, a brujero, known simply as don Juan, who lived in the Sonoran Desert. Carlos asked to interview him about...
The former Colonial Williamsburg Garden Historian, Wesley Greene, had a discussion with Scott Hemler, Colonial Williamsburg’s nurseryman this year in August, about the origin of our famous Compton Oak. In this exchange, Greene raised questions about the “legend” of this tree and how it came to be planted on Nicholson Street in historic Williamsburg. So, at Green’s suggestion, I began an investigation to see if the Archives at the Rockefeller Library could provide any additional information about the time...