NEW Bulbs for Autumn 2023

I was holed-up here this winter for what seems like forever, and tried to be productive, coming up with some new features for your enjoyment. First, the disclaimer: things are still a little raw, just like the weather; it will take some time to tweak and cajole it all into best behavior. But here are the high points I hope you will enjoy:Typographic and design enhancements that make the blog more readable. Slide shows to enrich your garden “visits” (find them from the tab up top). Bulbs and a winter garden walk for now; lots

Since 2011, Timothy has worked at Untermyer Park and Gardens in Yonkers, New York, which is becoming a horticultural destination for keen gardeners wanting inspiration–and a getaway for anyone just wanting to be surrounded by bold, contemporary plantings in a dramatic, historic setting. The Untermyer Gardens Conservancy is a non-profit organization collaborating with the City of Yonkers to facilitate the garden’s restoration (details on tours and how to visit otherwise are at the bottom of this page).In case you’re wondering: that garden has many vivid miles to go before it sleeps for winter. I even saw the phrase “floral fireworks” (such as the crape myrtles and hydrangeas in the right-hand photo below) used to describe it at the end of August, and there are plenty of foliage fireworks, too.Timothy and I worked together for years at “Martha Stewart Living” magazine, and he has been a gardener at the famed Wave Hill in New York City, and at the Garden Conservancy project called Rocky Hills

So I can invite guest experts to join me as well as share the program with other public-radio stations, we’re pre-taping “A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach” to stand alone, instead of airing live as part of my local station’s morning show, which it has been since March 2010.You can listen in to the first such standalone show here, right now. This week’s topic: When to sow what seeds, with guest Dave Whitinger of All Things Plants in Texas. Next time (February 4), the topic is why I’m going to grow calendul

I mean, it doesn’t close up shop or shut it doors on me or to visual enjoyment. The garden centers may need to stand idle a portion of each year, but not the landscape itself. And so, stubbornly and defiantly over a period of 25 years, at first accidentally and lately more intentionally as my knowledge has grown, I suppose I have made a garden for 365 days. Good thing I did, since I now live in it year-round, having left my career and the city in late 2007 after more than 20 years as a weekender in the Hudson Valley-Berkshires area of New York and Massachusetts.TO MAKE A YEAR-ROUND GARDEN was not my plan, or at least not a conscious one I could have explained when I began digging holes on an overgrown, bramble-infested bit of Columbia County, New York, land with little more to recommend it horticulturally beyond a half-dozen very old apples and a pair of ancient lilacs. My 365-day garden style was actually a happy side effect—a total serendipity—precipitated by my love of birds.Because birds’ needs vary at different times

You may recall my previous conversations with Thomas, the co-author with Claudia West of the provocative 2015 book “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes.” Even though we both have worked around plants for many years, it’s as if Thomas sees them differently from the way I do, in a sort of super-savvy botanical 3-D. He doesn’t see them as mere decorative objects, but astutely reads their body language for clues to who they want to grow with (or not) and how to put them all together successfully.I love how he sees, and thinks, as you can glean from our lively Q&A, where he says things like this:And this:Though not intentionally so, the Times article turns out to be especially timely—and not just because it’s early spring, and we gardeners need to make smarter choices

“Something odd has to happen for hairworms to be on soil or vegetation, instead of in water, so at first when I got those calls I thought: It must be earthworms,” says Hanelt, a Research Assistant Professor with the Center for Evolutionary and Theoretical Immunology in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “But I asked one caller to send me some—and lo and behold, they were hairworms.”It took years between the time Hanelt saw his first nematomorph, while on a survival-training hike in high school, until he actually knew what it was.“There they were out in the middle of the forest in winter, in a bucket of water,” he recalls. He saved the strange animal,

The selection is unlike in the early 1990s, when Ken published his first big shade-garden book and most people knew maybe two, hostas and astibles. Then, gardeners cursed shady areas of their yards as a liability to be eliminated instead of a refuge to be celebrated and expanded upon.Ken has been called the “guru of natural gardening” by “The New York Times,” but I just call him my old friend and the longtime master of the shade, and I’m was glad to welcome him back to my public-radio program to talk about making gardens in th

The book, appropriately called “Bread Toast Crumbs,” by Alexandra Stafford, got me thinking about not just bread for, say, a sandwich, but about bread as an ingredient in the simple, delicious recipes I can concoct with my upcoming garden produce. Examples: a thick, roasted tomato and bread soup, or orecchietti pasta with brown butter, Brussels sprouts leaves and homemade bread crumbs, or a salad that becomes a meal when it’s a version of panzanella–reviving even stale bread in the best, delicious Tuscan fashion.Alexandra Stafford is the creator of the popular food website Alexandra’s Kitchen at alexandracooks dot com. Though “Bread Toast Crumbs: Recipes for No-Knead Loaves and Meals to Savor Every Slice” is Ali’s debut cookbook, it has earned raves from

WHEN YOU’RE TALKING plants and not people, how do you figure out who lives where? You can’t send census takers door to door to get a head count, but doing so is a critical step in devising conservation strategies in a changing world, among other key goals. A New York Botanical Garden botanist is coordinating such an effort.

The first installment appeared April 20, 2020. On March 31, 2021, the paper ran a Q&A with me to kick off Year 2 of the series.The topics I’ve covered so far:Where to begin your spring cleanup in a chaotic season. Bed-prep using cardboard, newsprint and sometimes plastic sheeting. Shopping in your own garden for “free” plants. How to make a late-start flower garden of “annuals,” including many to direct-sow. Pruning Q&A with Jeff Jabco of Swarthmore’s Sco

Well, the new piece of land turned out to be bigger than the last, and it has fostered in Page a whole new relationship to gardening—especially, a more intimate connection to nature and the property’s wild-ish areas.Starting over, and the surprises along the way, are the subject of Page’s new book, called “Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again” (affiliate link). Page Dickey is a popular garden writer and author of numerou

From 2005 to 2020, Bruce was the director of Rutgers Gardens, the botanical garden for Rutgers University. He’s currently the State Program Leader for Home and Public Horticulture with the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, and a longtime instructor in the landscape architecture program at Rutgers.We covered natives from shad and sourwood to pawpaw and even Franklinia, plus imports, all with a wide range of qualities to recommend them (that’s the Rutgers-bred kousa dogwood ‘Scarlet Fire,’ above).Read along as you listen to the June 7, 2021 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTu