creating living willow structures, with michael dodge

Fountain in Oxford Botanic gardens.

Sometimes as gardeners, we place all the emphasis on plants. However, a few well positioned ornaments and focal points can heighten the interest and drama within a garden.

For over 25 years I have gardened a rockery or rock garden on a triangular patch of poor soil. I progressively scrounged and collected a range of granite, limestone and sandstone rocks and added them piecemeal. I aspired to growing alpine plants and recognised good drainage and shelter from winter wet weather would be key but that is as far as my planning would go. For the first couple of decades I was busy at work and wasn’t able to put in the effort of looking after small but hardy alpines.

Want to add a tropical flair to your garden this spring? Elephant ears will add a bold statement to a filtered sun or high shade spot. These striking “drama queens” of the garden may be either in genera Colocasia or Alocasia. The easiest way to tell these beauties apart is that colocasias (Colocasia esculenta) will have leaves that point downward, and alocasia (Alocasia species) leaves will point upward. Depending on the species or cultivar of each genus, the size can range from 3 to 10 feet tall and 2 to 10 feet in width. Both types of elephant ears are native to the tropical regions of Southeastern Asia.

I doubt that Broken Arrow, founded by Dick and Sally Jaynes in 1984 in Hamden, Connecticut, needs much introduction—especially lately, as they were just featured in a “New York Times” piece by my former colleague Anne Raver. As Anne mentioned in that article, Adam (now 33 years old) used to buy plants at Broken Arrow as a teen-ager; now he’s their Propagation and Plant Development Manager.In the latter role, he’s the kind of particular guy who goes looking for a winterberry holly that shows off even without its fruit on (gold-splashed foliage, anyone?); who has such a passion for witch hazels that the nursery now offers 45 cultivars; who tracked down a pink-flowered Stewartia and….but let him tell you:The Q&A With Adam WheelerQ. So what does it take to catch the eye of the guy whose job is to go around looking for new things to add into Broken Arrow’s already very sophisticated product mix? You must see a l

Tom Stearns is founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds in Vermont, with more than 20 years specializing in breeding, selecting and marketing of organic varieties. From microgreens indoors to baby-leaf to mini-heads and up to full-sized heads in the garden, we talked about timing, spacing and making lettuce happy—even which types hold up best in the heat (and ways to help all lettuce do better when summer arrives).Read along as you listen to the Jan. 14, 2019 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).success with lettuce, with tom stearnsQ. Over the years on the show you and I have talked about tomato h

If you said Heuchera, you’re right. Perhaps you’re going to reshuffle some shady beds this spring, and know that Heuchera, with their great foliage, can help make garden pictures work–but wonder which ones, and how best to use them. I invited George Coombs, trial garden manager at the must-visit Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, with 50 acres of native-plant display gardens and 500 acres of natural land, back to the radio show to help make the best choices and grow them to perfection.George knows from Heuchera, having trialed 83 varieties side by side (the exhaustive results are in this pdf). “I say to people, ‘I’m doing Consumer Reports for plants,'” he explains. Though there are countless varieties on the market, many are duplicative in appearance or just not distinctive. “I can honestly say that when it

Research from the nearby Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, reveals how acorns initiate a complex series of ecological chain reactions. And not just the obvious ways, like feeding turkeys or chipmunks or deer, but in influencing Gypsy moth outbreaks and tick-borne disease risk, and even the reproductive success of ground-nesting songbirds.Dr. Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist from Cary Institute, helped me understand what–both seen and unseen–is going on with those tiny acorns and their mighty, wide-ranging influences. Read along as you listen to the Oct. 19, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).my q&a on acorns’

IMARCHED UP THE HILL and stuck my face in a stand of twig willows and dogwoods the other day, starved for some color in this relentlessly mud-toned non-winter. The world looked really bright and shiny through their gold and red twigs, and then I remembered the giant pussy willows (Salix chaenomeloides, cut and stuck in a vase, above) down by the road and went to pay them a visit as well. Time to sound another cry in favor of these easiest of plants–and offer a new source of an incredible variety of willows, in particular.

Kate Spring, and her husband, Edge Fuentes, founded Good Heart Farmstead in Vermont in 2013, which serves up to 100 customers each season who subscribe to their CSA share program. Their farm is a hybrid business structure called an L3C, a low-profit, limited-liability company, where part of the mission is to support Vermonters in need of food access.Kate’s also a writer and the only person I know with her very own brand new yurt, which I couldn’t wait to hear about after having seen it be constructed on her Instagram.Read along as you listen to the December 14, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).mastering microgree

Read along as you listen to the June 26, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).evaluating monarda with george coombs of mt. cubaQ. We’ve talked before on the show about your past trials of other native plants like Baptisia and Heuchera—and native plants are the mission of Mt. Cuba, which is both a garden for visiting and a research center, right?A. Mt. Cuba Center is actually a former du Pont family estate, the Copeland family estate, and they left their estate to become a public garden. What kind of sets us apart from others in the area is that we focus on native plants. We broadly define our nativity region as the Eastern United States.We do a lot of work promoting plants in a display capacity in the gardens itself, and then we also do research like what I do, trying to help

Jeff is Director of Grounds and Coordinator of Horticulture at Scott and Swarthmore, where among the extensive and diverse plantings is a whole Tree Peony Garden area, one of the first collections established after Scott was founded in 1929 and now including more than 80 varieties of tree peonies. He is also vice-president of the Mid-Atlantic Peony Society.Why consider these plants? Tree peonies are deer-resistant, extremely cold-tolerant, long-lived and really don’t require a lot of complicated pruning. And oh, those flowers (that’s one of Jeff’s favorites, ‘Nike,’ up top.).Read along as you listen to the April 10, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or St