freezer-emptying hot 3-bean vegetarian chili

“If you look the right way, you can see the whole world is a garden.” ~Frances Hodgson Burnett~

Understanding the soil and natural conditions in your garden can help you organise and plan the type of garden that will be successful. I am going too offer tips on gardens with a sandy soil and in particular where there is a heat trap. To make a colourful impact in a tricky situation chose plants that grow naturally in those conditions.

Waterperry is a small village eight miles east of Oxford. It lies on the River Thame (not to be confused with River Thames), though the Thame does end up feeding into the Thames. The extensive gardens and river-side setting offer a combination of formal gardens, flowing herbaceous borders and wildlife meadows by the river. Helenium

‘Fiery’ hardly does justice to this cactus Dahlia.

Our son is a staunch vegetarian and his Christmas present this year will have a herb theme. He has the space for many pots and some new raised beds as he develops his garden 200 miles south of our Yorkshire home. It is  bound to be warmer down there if not Mediterranean.

Last fall I made the tough decision to sell our hot tub. After it was removed, we were left with a big ugly hole in the deck! But I thought maybe this space could make a nice backyard lounge area?

I have a collection of heirloom German flag iris from my mother’s garden along with shared plants from aunts and good friends. The cultivar names are unknown, but the memories of the people who shared them with me abound every time I see the irises bloom.

Crinum lilies are long-lived, heirloom, classic pass-along plants that shine in Southern gardens.

Click on the first thumbnail to start the slideshow, then toggle from image to image using the arrows beside each caption. Enjoy!If you like begonias, by the way, some past posts have profiled my favorites:Begonia ‘Bonfire’ Begonia ‘Bellfire’ Begonia ‘Dragon Wing Red’ Categoriesannuals & perennials slideshows

H ELLO SPRING, AND GOODBYE SPRING, all in one sizzling weekend as fiery-hot as this overblown tulip. Freezing a week ago, now the garden and I are suffering from burnout. I feel a weather rant coming on: complaints to register, anybody? Or shall we look on the bright side: Yes, the magnolias will come and go in a total of 72 hours, but there’s asparagus for dinner.I plant tulips for cutting only, not in my beds, and plan for bouquets to span the several weeks of tulip season by selecting an early, a middle and a late variety.

The Latin specific epithet, or species name, of the Stewartia I grow is pseudocamellia, which roughly means it disguises itself as a camellia when in bloom (a nod to the look of its lovely and plentiful white June-into-July flowers, and the fact they are very distant relatives in the Tea Family).But this Stewartia, from Japan, which gets to maybe 25 feet or so in a Northeast garden setting and is happy in part shade or sun, isn’t content to offer up just nice flowers for the privilege of living with you. It gives you peeling, lovely bark all season long (below), and hot fall color, too,

‘Hot Summer’ (a 2010 release, but new to my garden this spring from Klehm’s Song Sparrow Farm) is one of an impressive selection of recent Echinacea hybrids that seem to be getting better and better, almost insisting that I wake up to coneflowers again and make some room.  It was discovered in the nursery of Marco van Noort, a Dutch breeder, in 2007.The most exciting thing about ‘Hot Summer’ (Zone 4-9; 30-36 inches tall) is that yesterday the flower in the top photo was another fiery shade altogether. Each 4 1/2-inch flower opens yellow-orange and passes through an aging process to deep red, so once you have a lot of flowers you can have the whole fiery spectrum on the plant at once (ca