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… Read Article
Gardens/Gardeners
Spreading the Joy
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… Read Article
Sue’s List
“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!”… Read Article
Variations on a Green Theme
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… Read Article
Ketzel Levine
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… Read Article
J-P Malocsay, Working Gardener
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.”… Read Article
Photo Finish
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… Read Article
The Life of Riley
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… Read Article
A front row seat
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… Read Article
Building A Bulb Collection
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… Read Article
Renee Shepherd
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… Read Article