Great Gardeners

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…

My credo is, "if you find a seed, plant it." This goes for common plants as well as plants not usually found in the home. You don’t need an outside space to have a garden-a sunny window in your house will do…

Dutchman Piet Oudolf is very much part of a movement, a tendency in garden and landscape design that seeks to bring the wild and the natural back into the human habitat.

The fable of great gardeners is that they swallow a nasturtium seed during their first exploration of the backyard and are instantly and forever transformed into hortaholics. In Polly Hill’s case, the seed took far longer to germinate.

A prairie ecologist and nurseryman, Neil Diboll has worked ceaselessly to raise awareness about prairie plants and ecosystems and to further the cause of prairie restoration.

Among the plants and ideas he championed in Horticulture were a number that have since become staples of the gardening scene: cannas and dahlias, hot colors, see-through plants (like Verbena bonariensis), bold foliage, and of course, the mixed border, the everything-goes style that he epitomized.