If only there were more trees with the emphatic verticality of the Italian cypress. But there aren’t. The Italian cypress (also known as pencil pine) is a stand alone, in every sense. It stands ...
Elaeagnus x ebbingei is a great big brute of a shrub. At a maximum of about 5m tall by the same wide, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever want to release it into your garden in an untamed form. But ...
OK, I’m a bit nervous about this one. I guess it comes down to whether Plant of the Week is about raising plant awareness or whether it represents plant promotion. For I want to write about Cotone ...
My suggestion for plant of this week is one which holds deep significance to a country currently enduring great suffering. The war in Ukraine continues to shock the world with Russia’s obscene bruta ...
If you’re a long-term reader of The Gardenist, you’ll know that I’m forever in two minds about evergreen grasses. Nearly everyone in a climate sufficiently moderate to grow the wide range of e ...
Like most kids, I grew up plant-blind. But Virginia creeper, along with its relative Boston ivy, somehow broke through and made itself known to me. I recall, from the earliest age, a charming old ...
Decades ago my gardening friends and I attended a lecture given by the renowned Irish gardener Helen Dillon. To be frank I remember little of that event except one outlandish statement declared by Hel ...
How would you respond if told there was a new deep purple/blue salvia on the market, that absolutely laughed at root-ridden soil and flowered brilliantly in quite deep shade? First, I’d be skeptic ...
Two really fabulous books have arrived in the mail over the last few months. One I bought and one was a freebie, given that some of my design work appears in it. (Whether the latter revelation inval ...
I vividly remember the day I thought I had to get better acquainted with Lespedeza. How could I forget? It was a day of ridiculous perfection on Lake Como, Italy, and the garden at Villa Melzi was a ...
Apologies to my neighbours, who had a near perfect autumn morning on Saturday partially ruined by several hours of brush-cutter noise as I cut back my rough grass, into which is planted several bulb s ...
The very first time I recall hearing the name Koelreuteria was at Sissinghurst, where there was a comically lame specimen in the cottage garden. No one seeing it would ever be tempted to grow one. ...
I’m not sure whether it’s the demands of design work, or the demands of my own (too-big) garden, or sheer curiosity, but I’m forever pondering questions of how much work is involved in the growi ...
Is the function of your garden to be primarily a background to your life – the space you sit in when you dine outdoors, or the stage you set for your afternoon G and T? Or is your garden meant to be ...
It’s a magic moment every year when my crepe myrtle, Lagerstroemia ‘Natchez’, starts flowering. It’s specially magical because the blossom is scented. I had no idea that there was such a thing ...
In one of the lockdowns last year (can’t recall which. Who can?) I cut down a long row of past-their-use-by-date Acacia retinodes along my northern boundary. That left a huge, deep bed of really ...
Like most creatives, I’m easily rattled. And, frankly, I’ve come to love a good rattling. I love nothing more than being unglued by visiting a garden so different from mine that it makes me w ...
The truth is that virtually any well-grown clematis, except perhaps the more common montana types, is likely to induce a groan of acquisitive longing from me. There’s just something so other-world ...