Author Archives: Les Brake

If complacency is the enemy of great gardening, then Alaskans are fortunate to the extreme. Every few years, we lose big chunks of our gardens to winters that are unusually terrible, and we get to start all over again, or very nearly so. However, when many hundreds of favorite plants were killed in a recent snowless winter, I was tempted to give up gardening in the subarctic…Even before I could see the full extent of the damage, a saving thought struck me: I would have to view the massive winter kill as an opportunity rather than a problem. That’s right—the garden wasn’t two-thirds dead, it was one-third full…