cooking with what you have: ‘start simple,’ with lukas volger

Living and working in northwestern Oregon, garden designer Wesley Younie is no stranger to dealing with challenging environments. When presented with this garden’s elevation changes, drainage management, and extreme climate conditions, he devised a plan that addresses it all—along with a specific functional wish list from the homeowners. Want to know which plants he used? Here are the plant IDs for this beautiful, sustainable landscape.

Are you dreaming of an exotic garden full of flowers with hard to pronounce names that will awe your guests? An understandable dream. But most tropical green life are not meant to grow in the weather conditions that the UK offers.

“As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University” Blackadder Goes Forth, 1989

A happy and pleasant surprise has just arrived through the post at home.

Reflecting on Thanksgiving and getting ready for round two. Here’s the takeaway:

Plants are often prized for their flowers, but that isn’t the case for the Poinsettia. The showy portions of this popular holiday plant aren’t petals or even flowers at all. Instead, they are modified leaves known as bracts. The flowers, called cyathia, are located at the center of the bracts. Each cyathium contains one female flower surrounded by many male flowers as well as glands that secrete nectar.

The Acalypha ‘Giant Leaf,’ splashed with pinky-peaches, gold and green, and my beloved Calibrachoa ‘Terra Cotta’ that I’ve grown flats of each year since it was introduced not long ago, seemed an obvious pairing. The Acalypha, a tropical shrub in its native haunts, will get 2 or 3 feet tall by summer’s end. You probably know what the million bells will do, much like a tiny petunia. I love how it, too, has a mosaic of color…two chameleons in a single big pot.The barrel below, beside by barn, is barely getting started. But in it is a canna called ‘Grande’ with red edges and giant green leaves (I remove the flowers if they ever form), a couple of gold leaf He

On Saturday, June 8, join me and Adam Wheeler of Broken Arrow Nursery in my garden for tours and a giant plant sale, and select from among an entire day of plant-themed offerings celebrating both herbs and flowers in nearby Hillsdale: herb cooking and flower arranging and growing.Plus, learn to be a better birder in a morning talk and guided walk/workshop, with Kathryn Schneider, past president of the NY State Ornithological Association and author of “Birding the Hudson Valley.” Don

1. Don’t skip the part about digging the trench, which one Cornell University bulletin describes as a W-furrow (illustrated below). Some people simply dig an 18-inch-wide by 12-inch-deep trench and spread the roots out flat in the bottom. In a W-furrow, a ridge of soil hoed into place down the middle (in this case of a shallower trench, just 6-8 inches deep) supports the spider-like roots.2. Don’t bury the crowns all at once, but rather fill the trench in gradually as the topgrowth develops through the first season.3. Don’t forget to water as the crowns make their way to establishing a deep root system. Details on planting and careare here.Picking4. Don’t pick too soon from a new planting. Some sources say you can pick a little starting one

MY ‘SISTER’ PAIGE SMITH ORLOFF, one of my non-genetic “sisters” on The Sister Project dot com website that I also enjoy creating, is quite a cook. (I can attest to that since she’s also a neighbor, and I have partaken.

P EOPLE LIKE TO ASK ME QUESTIONS, GARDENING QUESTIONS. It’s been happening for a couple of decades, and lately, well, lately it’s getting worse (better?). More urgent, you might say, as in more urgent garden questions than ever.

NO, I WAS NOT BORN IN WACO, TEXAS, nor do I play the banjo. And no, I never worked at Disneyland, though these days I feel as if I live in a fairytale, if not a theme park exactly.