hot links: earliest look at snowflakes; try oregano, not antibiotics; fresh as a frog's skin

‘Fiery’ hardly does justice to this cactus Dahlia.

I found this little guy while walking through the woods, scoping out turkey hunting spots. This species spends most of the year high in the trees, so finding it down low is likely a sign that breeding season has begun.

Sarton, who today is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as phrases like “women’s literature,” or covered in women’s studies curriculums, wrote more than 50 books. She actually came to my attention thanks to two men, at different times in my life. I might have missed her altogether if not for a one-two punch by Sydney Schanberg, an ex-New York Times colleague who thirty-odd years ago offhandedly said, “You would like May Sarton,” and then years later my therapist (who gave me “Journal of a Solitude”).It wasn’t her emerging influence on feminism that provoked their decades-ago recommendations. They knew that the natural world, and specifically the garden, called to me, as it did Sarton.“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself,” she wrote.SARTON, A PROLIFIC POET and author of fiction, also wrote memoir

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.

WE DO THIS ON FACEBOOK DAILY: I read something that grabs my attention, and pass it on. Easy: I just insert a link and a comment, click, go. But I realize only about 8,000 so far of you “like” the A Way to Garden Facebook page (care to join us there?), and that I must make an effort to share my random “bookmarks” more regularly with the wider group. And so…

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,

DID YOU KNOW that robins can count, or that food (not paper or plastic) is the biggest single source of fodder for U.S. landfills? Those stories, and more, are among the latest links.

‘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

Many of you, like I do, probably enjoy watching birds, but what prompts a person to set out to pursue a big year, as it’s called in the world of extreme birding? And what besides a possible record do they potentially gain in the process?On the occasion of the publication of his latest book, “Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World,” I wanted to ask Noah all that–and also for some advice on being a

LATEST LINKS: Too-hot-to-handle weather has had me indoors for a broad swath of each recent day, and that means more than the usual dose of web browsing—and a couple of new links to share. One (a video) is an extraordinary take on dragonflies; the other a moving essay on what I think is the garden’s most important and insistent message: that nothing lasts. The latter is delivered not by a gardener at all, but by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. Some decidedly non-horticultural but ever-so-moving links I think you’ll like:

The guy up top (a green frog, Rana clamitans) spent most of the season tucked into a big pot of Oxalis vulcanicola by the bigger frogpond out back, soaking up the rays and waiting for unsuspecting insects to pass his way. The male green frog who made his summer home my above-ground seasonal water gardens–two big troughs I fill with water by my kitchen door, like this–considered a nearby bromeliad (in this case a Vriesea) to be his digs, when he wasn’t at poolside. (Some years little tree frogs have tucked the