I WASN’T CERTAIN everyone else would share my enthusiasm about what really amounts to a giant birdfeeder: grasses and forbs setting seed; hollies, aralias and viburnum fruiting up; the last migrating hummingbirds dive-bombing the self-sown Nicotiana. But I opened the garden anyhow one more time, on September 20, and I’m glad I did. A slideshow of highlights.
For a Garden Conservancy Open Day here, it was relatively sane and quiet: just 175ish guests, and no lectures or workshops on the agenda, the way there usually are. Just the garden, and the plant sale by Broken Arrow Nursery–our fourth time this season together.
Visitors, and many bumblebees and other pollinators looking for a late-season meal, were attracted to easy-to-grow ‘September Charm’ anemone, which has been in bloom for at least six weeks already.
My houseplants, including various bromeliads and many large fancy-leaf begonias, will soon head indoors for winter, with colder nights approaching.Even though relatively few leaves have their fall pigments on display yet, there is always plenty of gold at my place, from my favorite gold foliage plants, and now from gold fruit of yellow winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata ‘Chrysocarpa’) and Viburnum dilatatum ‘Michael Dodge.’
Have a further look around:
the slideshow from sept. 20
MOVE FROM SLIDE TO SLIDE by hovering your cursor over the middle of the right side of an image, then click to advance.
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Summer slowly withdraws and autumn takes over. Days grow shorter and nights become cooler. And as trees shed leaf after leaf – little harbingers of the colder months to come, you can get your mind off how yet another summer has passed and how fleeting time in general is by doing some practical tasks around your garden this September.
A fad in modern architecture and gardening or a necessity to bring back nature into industrialised densely built urban landscapes? Living green walls are becoming more and more popular, so we decided to explore the benefits, installation and maintenance process of these structures. Read on to find out how long they have been around, why so many buildings are having them, and how you can make one for your home.
In Yorkshire we are lucky to have several gardens designed using the theme of a Himalayan Garden. The Hut near Ripon at Grewlthorpe is  ‘The Himalayan Garden’ with all the plants you would expect in such a setting including
Britain has some of the best gardens in the world. The choice of which to visit is far larger than this selective list but at least it gives you somewhere to start planning this years outings.
In the cold wet winter it is a good time to plan where to visit as the year improves. The South West is the obvious place to start your visiting tour of gardens containing exotic plants.
China is one of the great destinations for visiting gardens. The influence over garden design and the vast array of plants and flowers is secondary to the investment in time and dedication demonstrated in so many great locations. This is just a selection of those you may consider visiting if you can make the journey..
Peace is not just the absence of war it can be a reflection of a personal inner tranquility. To many gardeners peace may be a state of harmony with nature. It is a theme of several ‘hard landscape’ projects and sculptural works as shown by the selection of Peace gardens below.
Holland Park has some Zen like features but fails my Zen test. The classic elements of a successful Zen are stone, sand or gravel, water, plants and space. Then there is a question of balance between yin and yang. Cramped or cluttered gardens inhibit the flow of spirit so space is potentially the key ingredient of a Zen garden.
I was picking the Czar plums to make more jam when a wasp was disturbed from eating it’s lunch. Wasps go for my plums just as they are at their sweetest best. My problem was I couldn’t see which plums had a wasp in the fruit if they were above head height or facing away from my hand. The resulting sting set me on the trail of other stingers in the garden.
Not what you would expect for a garden called ‘The Phoenix Garden’ in the middle of Tottenham Court Road near Crown Point. It isn’t a phoenix from the ashes of a great fire or a WW11 bomb site at but was built on a disused car park in the 1980s. It may be part of an overflowing burial ground for St Giles-in-the-field church back in the 1600s and is reputed to be the last surviving Covent ‘Garden’. The entrance is located in St Giles Passage
Garden Sprouts is a program I run at the South Carolina Botanical Garden that is designed for preschoolers and caregivers. This class takes place once a week for three months every spring and fall. The goal is to share age-appropriate nature-based activities with children, who are mostly three to five years old, but sometimes younger or older. Over time I have learned the caregivers also learn things they never knew, enjoy the activities immensely, and are able to connect more deeply to the natural world through this program. The structure of this hour-long program is three-fold, we begin inside with a book related to the theme of the day, a walk or outdoor activity, and finally a craft. In this blog, I would like to share some of the books, outdoor activities, and crafts we have done in this class.