A cook recalls how one famous chef led her from stove to garden and back

Shadow is known around the world as one of the most connected of plantsmen and as the most active acquirer of unusual plants. The letters strewn across his desk come from across town and around the globe. People write with pictures of possible introductions.“Send cuttings, send seed,” he responds. They write for advice on what to do with a new plant that’s been discovered in some remote swamp or hollow. “Send cuttings, send seed,” he responds. They write looking for the rarest of the rare and the oddest of the odd. “I’ve got cuttings, I’ve got seed,” he responds...

“Mainly, to make my northern relatives jealous,” my friend Sue replied with a grin when asked what had prompted her to compile her list of the 60 species blooming in her garden on March 13, 2007. “They’ve got snow, and we’ve got things blooming!”...

When garden designer Suzanna Porter is working on a design in her Berkeley, California, office, she doesn't have to travel far for ideas and inspiration. A simple 90-degree turn from her drawing table reveals her own garden...

Some time ago, I went public with my ambivalence about roses. I admitted that this humbling genus pushed all my buttons about conformity, tradition, and settling down (and I’ll bet you thought roses were just high-maintenance plants). Since then, I’ve moved again -another short-term rental -but a rose now climbs over the garden gate celebrating a future other than mine...

A beautiful garden is a collaborative effort between its maker and its plants, neither more important than the other. The gardener envisions the garden, but the plants realize it. And in so doing they frequently create effects the gardener never anticipated...

Lively gardens are full of stories, and J-P Malocsay has managed for years to delightfully blur the lines between gardening and storytelling. Malocsay describes his life until age 42 as that of a perennial student, “one who loved university life not wisely but too well.”...

I missed my chair. For six summers I sat in that Adirondack chair beneath the front yard’s silver maple to take notes on my garden, my notebook supported by its wide, flat arm. Hummingbirds whizzed past my head on a beeline to the Malvaviscus, while swallowtails danced among the phloxes and dangled from the ballooning joe-pye weed...

My husband and I are the curators of a little bulb museum, on our very typical 60-by-120-foot lot in an older neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. We live on McGee Street, and we call our museum the Hortus Bulborum McGeeinsis, a name inspired by the Hortus Bulborum in Holland , a living museum of rare bulbs...

It was soccer that got Renee Shepherd into the seed business. In the mid-1980s, while she was completing a PhD (in the history of consciousness) at University of California, Santa Cruz, she mowed a pasture alongside her house to make a soccer field...