Garden Visits

I’ll always remember my first time walking into a daffodil show. As the door opened, cool air laden with the smell of daffodils rushed to greet me…

Joy Creek Nursery is all about people, plants, and a strong sense of place. Knowledgeable and friendly nursery employees welcome customers with a map of the site, a current catalog, a clipboard, and an exhortation to have fun exploring the six acres of gardens, trial beds, and retail offerings…

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…

It is fascinating when an artist—a painter, a sculptor, or a photographer—turns to garden making, and translates his or her well-honed principles of composition to exterior design and planting. Clive Nichols is one of the best known garden photographers, with images featured in countless books, magazines, and calendars around the world. His own garden blends his mastery of composition with the plant knowledge he has collected through his work…

Although the Big Apple prides itself in all avenues of the offbeat, Michael Riley is quite possibly one of a kind. He tends ferns, begonias, and orchids in his apartment on the Upper West Side, but you’ll find few potted plants there. Michael’s collection scales two cork bark-covered walls, floor to ceiling, a living wallpaper for this urban gardener…

To summer visitors, the Adirondack Mountains of northeast New York offer warm, pleasant scenes at every turn. Rustic lakeside camps, where log cabins nestle amid colorful flower beds and boast overflowing window boxes, suggest living (and gardening) here would be so easy. But year-round residents like Pamela Dore, a landscape designer in the small town of Au Sable Forks (near Lake Placid), know this setting’s challenges…

In case you’ve never been there, Texas is big. From San Antonio, where the last vestiges of the South drop off, it is still five hundred miles west to El Paso and six hundred miles north to the top of the panhandle…

Gardens are not just about plants; they are about the people who create them. Gardens need a personality and a vision to be successful. These things are especially crucial for public gardens—without them, they are only background landscape. . . .

The plot for Eudora Welty’s most autobiographical novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, unfolds after the family patriarch, Judge McKelva, prunes a rose heavy with memories in his rambling garden. The rose, called Becky’s Climber in the book, comes straight out of Welty’s garden in Jackson, Mississippi.

For most of us, moving entails packing up our clothes, hoisting our furniture, transporting it all to a new location, and setting up housekeeping. When obsessed plantsmen Sean Hogan and the late Parker Sanderson relocated to Portland, Oregon, in April 1995, their 5,000 precious plants took up far more space in the moving van than all their other possessions…