spring

Cold climate gardeners, we knew this was going to happen, didn't we? After the incredible, pinch-me-I'm-dreaming spell of beautifully warm weather, the real March weather is coming back with a vengeance. I don't think it got quite as warm here as it did other places in my general area, but it got warm enough to [...]

This slow, cold, cloudy spring is sorely trying my patience. It's taking forever for anything to bloom. But then, looking over past GBBD posts, it's really not that far behind other springs. It's just that last year, spring came earlier than usual. Somehow that became the new normal, just like that. How soon we forget. [...]

Surely this starting into growth is the true Spring in plant life, whether it be an awakening due to the melting of a covering of snow as with the true alpines, or the commencement of the rains in the African veldt; and so long as we can see some plant in the garden starting off [...]

The view from here is wonderful, as long as my back is to the garden, and my gaze goes across the road, across the far side of the valley. Turn around, and--oh! All sorts of plants in pots, needing to be planted. All sorts of weeds needing to be pulled where the plants are to [...]

Maybe you can't see it (go ahead and click on the photo for a closer look), but my eyes can see that the trees on the hillside have a definite reddish cast to them. This is reckoned as the first sign of spring here in Purdyville, or more properly, the sign that enables us to [...]

One of the many good things about spring is that without it, and without the absence imposed by fall and winter, we flawed mortals might fail to appreciate the beauties around us. So much of the wonder of spring is found in the return of what was absent. Would the appearance of new leaves and [...]

I spent my childhood in climates where the flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) flourished, and I loved its elegant simplicity. When we moved here, I was dismayed but not surprised when my new neighbor told me that she had twice planted a flowering dogwood in a protected corner of her house, and twice it had died. [...]

If you are short on time, energy, and money, but notably the first two, be conservative. You'll be more pleased with one fair-sized, well-composed, well-maintained bed than with a half-dozen large beds that are choked with quack grass and creeping Charlie. That's excellent advice from The Complete Flower Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler and Barbara [...]

And though one has begun to search for signs of spring almost since January, and to receive them, like postcards sent on a long voyage to home, it is with the greening of the grass that spring has, finally, certainly arrived. It wasn't until I read A Year at North Hill : Four Seasons in [...]