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...
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...
“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...
Our contemporary Christmas celebration is an amalgamation of many diverse strands of meaning, custom, and tradition. The first English colonists who ventured to Virginia on behalf of the Virginia Company of London brought their traditions and customs with them. And those customs were already an odd mix drawing bits from the ancient world of the Neolithic Celts, the Greeks and the Romans; all molded into the contemporary post-Reformation culture of urban England. Keep in mind that the earliest Virginia...
Vines of all types love our Coastal Virginia climate. Many different species thrive in summer’s heat and humidity, growing by inches each day. They creep across the ground until they encounter something to climb. Their tender, flexible tips reach up and out in search of a support, and then they climb. Benefits of Vines All vines in our area produce flowers and seeds. While some flowers are bright and showy, like the bright orange trumpet creeper, others are nearly...
I love finding mountain laurel growing in large, lovely masses in the wild. Its creamy pink flowers glow softly in the forest. Wild mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, sometimes grows along the undeveloped banks of creeks and rivers in Eastern Virginia. It grows as an understory shrub in our oak, beach and pine forests. These evergreen shrubs, almost small trees, simply blend into the fabric of the woods through much of the year before bursting into bloom, suddenly elegant and...
In late autumn, the Williamsburg area woods light up with evergreen holly trees as the hardwoods lose their leaves. It is their time to sparkle in the winter sunshine. Their broad, prickly leaves are waxy on top, reflecting what light reaches them through the forest canopy. Unobtrusive throughout the summer, hollies are among the few forest trees, along with wax myrtle, pines, cedars, and magnolias, which remain bright green and covered in leaves throughout the year. Holly King Legends...
From November through May we can admire the living mathematics of the trunks and branches of hardwood trees. Their leafy crowns have fallen, and their beautiful bark in all its silvery, marbled, textured variety is revealed once again. Looking up, we sometimes see lively green clusters of mistletoe shining in the treetops. These shrubby, evergreen plants have been a part of myth and folklore since ancient times. They live suspended between heaven and Earth, rooted into the branches of...
Cardinals nest in a large evergreen shrub beside my kitchen window. Though the shrub, Ligustrum, is frowned upon by many contemporary gardeners as invasive, the birds don’t know that. They delight in its abundant berries and the insects that visit year-round. We delight in watching the birds come and go, even as they peer in the windows at us. We amuse one another. Cardinals, titmice and other birds also perch in the crape myrtle tree a little further out...
Opening Last night I had a peculiar and rather disturbing dream. I dreamt that I was driving my car at night careening wildly and uncontrollably along a coastal mountain highway. It was pitch black, high up on the winding and twisting roads with the sinister ocean waves crashing loudly beneath the cliffs. Quite suddenly, the car shot off the road and started plummeting toward the ocean below! I panicked and tried to scream but nothing came out! And just before...