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 high...
Fiddleheads Perfect little green, tightly curled fiddleheads will soon push through the damp earth and begin to unfurl themselves into delicate fern fronds. They might look tasty, and you might wonder whether you can pluck one to nibble as you hike through the woods. Coastal Virginia hosts almost 30 native fern species, and fern-loving gardeners plant dozens more introduced species. Quite honestly, unless you are a Pteridophile, or fern-o-phile, they probably look much the same. You will find fiddleheads in...
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...
“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...
Colonial Williamsburg welcomes visitors to the natural beauty of one of the wilder, quieter portions of the historic area. The Bassett Trace is named after Burwell Bassett, Martha Washington’s nephew and a Virginia legislator and congressman. In 1800, he purchased a white farmhouse near the trailhead. In 1936, that farmhouse, now known as Bassett Hall, became the favorite home of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. During the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, an...
We can consider winter as the ‘weekend’ of the gardening year, both the last month and the first months of the year when we can enjoy a much-needed rest from the regular routine. A period of rest and renewal restores energy to both the garden and the gardener. It allows us time for reflection on the successes and challenges of seasons past and an opportunity to plan and prepare for the seasons to come. If winter is the weekend,...
There is a special beauty in the form and structure of a bare tree after it has dropped its annual crop of leaves. Like the beauty of a classical statue, one can see the truth of its bones. Leaves, for all of their movement and color, veil the beauty of branches and buds. Looking at a bare tree is a study in pure potential. All of the tree’s life draws inwards to the wood and roots as...
The first Camellia shrub usually chooses a stretch of damp, cool October days to burst into bloom. I am always taken by surprise when its luminous white, spring-like blossoms unfold, because they look rather out of place beside the colorful leaves falling from nearby trees. Bright flowers in shades of white, pink, and red open on our evergreen Camellia shrubs each October and November while the rest of the garden fades, and as we begin preparing for winter’s...