There’s this thing going on the The States at the moment, where they stick their pots of annuals and perennials full of….well…sticks. It may well be happening elsewhere, but its been a while s ...
Just back from the USA, and lingering in a state of garden bliss. In no other two- week period of my life have I accessed such a broad spectrum of garden aspiration and achievement (except, perhaps, r ...
So I’m swanning around Washington DC, and wander into a huge bookshop, with the intention of checking out the garden books. In the pre-internet days we didn’t see any American garden books in Au ...
Not quite twenty years ago a single image in a movie spawned – for me – a whole new way of looking at gardens. It was just a passing moment in Sally Potter’s Orlando. If you haven’t seen thi ...
Firewood is now such a frightful price that you feel compelled to maximize the layers of pleasure it can provide. The provision of warmth alone isn’t enough. As it happens, I like the way it smell ...
OK, enough of the frivolity. This is serious. This is practical. Check out this pic. It compares three pots of the Lilium formosanum I wrote about last week. They were all sown at the same tim ...
I’m in a kind of melt over Lilium formosanum. I’ve known it for 30 years, from gardening around it at Ripponlea, but have never (inexpicably) grown it myself until now. It is a truly remarkable ...
Know what this is people? Ice. On the windscreen. Last week! 20th March, to be precise Got in the car 3°C One hour later 7°C Drove only 20 mins west and dropped approx. 400m in elevation ...
So here’s the rest of the poem, following on from Monday’s post. My point was that if real plants were truly in danger of being superseded, the media and the nurseries had to take partial respon ...
Well over a decade ago the Horticultural Media Association in NSW asked me to contribute to a kind of debate called ‘Gardens of the Future will have no plants’. The timing was perfect, as Leo Sc ...
I think I’m past the plant snobbery phase. You kind of have to let it go when you observe yourself starting to really enjoy plants again that you once dismissed, and so accept what you’ve suspec ...
It’s pretty widely known that zinnias (unlike the cosmos discussed in the post here, for which it’s never mentioned) are best when direct sown. That’s all well and good where you’ve got the le ...
I really should have learned by now that the satisfaction/fun/pleasure returns from any particular job in the garden are nearly impossible to predict. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve p ...
I ought to be ashamed of my cosmos. And I am. When you know how good it can be; how tall, wide, strong – muscular, even – then you know that this is a pathetic effort, if not quite a total fai ...
For several totally disconnected reasons I’m back in the zone of thinking about plant-driven gardens vs design-driven gardens. If you were here, I wouldn’t be able to resist telling you each of ...
In the background of the main pic in my last post there was a fuzzy mix of Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ and the annual Ammi majus, known here as Queen Anne’s lace. The grass started flowering a ...
Some time in the next couple of weeks – if these berserk winds don’t blow it over first – I’ll flower, for the first time, the very proud and stately Verbascum splendidum. The build up has b ...