Peonies

Things are finally blooming in the garden at the new house, only I don't know what they are. Well, for the most part, I know what genus they are, but not the variety. So I'd like to show you some of what I've got, and maybe you can tell me more about them. There are [...]

The unseasonably mild weather has prompted me to start in on garden clean-up. And since the garden was untended for at least a year, there is a lot of cleaning up to do. This was what the garden looked like last year in early June, the first time we went to see the house we [...]

Herbert Butterfield's essay (The Whig Interpretation of History) was an attack on liberal triumphalism [i.e., the 'Whig interpretation']…Whig history purveyed a concept of progress as the central theme of English history…It has become common among historians to speak of 'whig history' for any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the [...]

I visited Hitch Lyman's garden in Trumansburg, NY. on May 8th. It was one of the Garden Conservancy's Open Gardens, as I mentioned previously. His Temple Nursery is the only U.S. nursery that specializes in snowdrops. The snowdrops were long gone, but lilacs and species peonies were blooming. Hitch Lyman has a wonderful Greek Revival [...]

Spent 2 hours cutting dead stuff down (mostly peony foliage), revealing weeds that will have to be pulled another day. Sigh.

In a cold climate, the gardening season is shorter and more compressed. By the time the spring flowers get going, boom! it's summer. Consider this: on May 29th we had our last frost. The next day it hit 80F (27C), which we reckon to be summery, and a mere nine days later it was 92F [...]

If you can have only one of Jeff Gillman's books, The Truth About Organic Gardening: Benefits, Drawbacks, and the Bottom Line is the one to get. Don't get me wrong, The Truth About Garden Remedies is an interesting and informative read, but it mostly tells you what doesn't work, or what only "sorta" works. The [...]

Canada thistle weaves throughout the peony bedObservant readers may have noticed the prickly-leaved weed sidling up to 'Rozella' in my last post. That dastardly villain is Canada thistle, aka Cirsium arvense, and it is one nasty customer. According to the University of California Cooperative Extension, Once established, Canada thistle spreads rapidly by horizontal roots, up [...]

'Bev' was planted in fall 2002 and has filled out substantiallyPeonies remind me of my paternal grandmother. Whether it was an evening with her bridge group, Sunday Mass, or a family cookout, she always dressed fashionably, including fully applied makeup and perfume. To be called glamorous was a compliment she always appreciated. She also grew [...]