doodle by andre: entering the no-mow zone

A cherry plum, sweet, thin-skinned and very prolific (you’ll also find it sold under ‘Red Grape Sugar Plum’). It was in the top three of our recent taste test and everyone liked it for its strong tomato flavour that’s sweet but not overly so, and its firm not mushy texture. It has a slight acidity running through it which all sweet tomatoes need. It ripens quite late compared to ‘Sungold’ and produces for a long period of time. It’s lovely in a mixed salad with the larger varieties. 

Are you frustrated because there are dandelions and other weeds in your lawn? Did you know that dandelion flowers provide one of the first springtime sources of pollen for bees, butterflies, and other pollinating insects?

APPARENTLY MRS. ANDRE’S TOMATOES succumbed to “tiny insect things that will not leave our garden alone,” we hear this week from Himself, who very sweetly shared the actual sympathy postcard he drew for Herself on the occasion of her lost tomatoes.

No, I have still not met Andre, though we’ve been in contact for more than a year. But we grow a little closer every week when the latest stash of doodles-in-progress arrives, and I get glimmers into the thought process that is behind them, just like I did when I read his memoir, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” (There is no better book to give your shrink; it should be on the curriculum of psychoanalytic institutes and departments of psychiatry in teaching hospitals and schools of social work, I swear. Insurance companies should mail it out to all patients using mental-health coverage, so they know they are not alone.) Some week

ANDRE THE DOODLER IS ALLOWED TO PUT DOWN HIS PEN every now and again, and this is one of those weeks. If you can’t live without your weekly Andre fix, try browsing through the image-driven archive of every last doodle he’s created here in the last two years.

Click on the first thumbnail to start the show, and toggle from slide to slide by using the arrows. Note: You may have to scroll to find the arrows below the verticals, in particular. Enjoy.What are all these images, and where did they come from suddenly? My beloved Nebraskan-English-Transplant correspondent explains (imagine this with an accent if you can):“My mum has begu

He said this one was for medicinal purposes only. Hmmm….And he also said alcohol was on the list of required gear.I don’t think there’s any explaining away what happened in this one. Hiccup!Or should I just say: Cheers!Tagsandre jordan

MY GARDENING LIFE STARTED with a hedge—cutting one back hard, specifically. It was the threadbare, tall old privet surrounding my childhood home, and I was determined to “rejuvenate” it, after reading about the process in a book. No artful hedge has ever been created by my hands, though—a fact that feels all the more lamentable after watching Sean Conway’s video tour (above) of designer and nurseryman Piet Oudolf’s garden in the Netherlands. What magic.

Andrew, who is now assistant director of the Chicago Botanic Garden, is past president of Magnolia Society International’s board of directors, and remains a member of the society’s board. In his tenure over 20 years as curator at Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Andrew built the magnolia collection from about 50 to more than 200 cultivars. That’s a lot of magnolias.Now Andrew Bunting is author of a book on the queen of flowering trees, called “The Plant Lover’s Guide to Magnolias,” just out from Timber Press as part of an ongoing series on various distinctive genera of plants.We talked magnolias on my public-radio show and podcast. Read along while you listen in to the April 25, 2016 edition of the podcast using the player below (or at this link)–and even learn how to train a magnolia or any w

HOW MANY -PEDES DOES IT HAVE, I ASK? CENTI- OR MILLI- OR ??? All I know is that they creep me out, too, my dear friend Andre Jordan–or at least startle me when they come pedaling prehistorically in my direction out of nowhere.

NOBODY LIKES TO BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED, including plants, and those who did the under-appreciating (read: me) the last few months are now in hot water as the weather chills out. I sense an uprising about to happen, a conifer uprising.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT EXCAVATION OR ROOT CANAL ANDRE’S GOT GOING, but the to-do lists here feel plenty big enough to engulf me, speaking of black holes. Whenever Andre doodles about digging holes, it makes me hear the theme song to a favorite show, “The Wire,” especially the version of the Tom Waits song by the amazing Steve Earle.