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☆ Take a Break From Modern Life and Refresh Your Herb Garden
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-24 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Carly Still had been working as a gardener in the Hudson Valley when she decided to move to the city 13 years ago. She happened onto a part-time position at the Met Cloisters, in Upper Manhattan, where she encountered many plants for the first time — ones with curious common names like skirret, weld and costmary — and others that she knew too well, or thought she did. Among the familiar ones were several that she had removed whenever she came upon them in her old job. Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), for example, is tricky to garden around in cultivated areas, as anyone who has accidentally grabbed a handful while weeding or brushed bare skin against it will attest. She also recognized greater burdock (Arctium lappa), broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) and even some dandelions in the Bonnefont Cloister Herb Garden, one of three main gardens at the museum of medieval art that opened in 1938 as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Persons: Carly Still, — Organizations: Metropolitan Museum of Art Locations: Hudson, Upper Manhattan

☆ Is Your Garden Missing Something? You May Need a Large Pot (or Several).
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-03 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

But Stephen Procter’s large stoneware garden vessels, some as tall as five feet and incorporating 250 pounds of clay, are nevertheless functional pottery — even without the soil and the plants. In the clay world, he said, there’s always talk about functional versus nonfunctional pottery, attempting to draw a line between the two. Mr. Procter, a Vermont-based ceramist, has seen his and other such outsize garden sculptures in action, though. “An object that invites contemplation, and inspires, and offers this kind of mysterious sustenance is functional in a deep and important way,” he said. “Not functional that you’re going to drink your coffee out of it, but the work has high purpose in the landscape and in the world.”

Persons: Stephen, there’s, Procter, ” Locations: Vermont

☆ Why Japanese Maples Are Like Potato Chips (or Orchids)
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-27 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Matthew and Timothy Nichols’s story could be a case study of what it means to manifest something. The goal they realized: To amass an enviable collection of Japanese maples and establish a leading role in championing them. And they knew where they might learn at least some of it. The brothers, then 21 and 27, planned a pilgrimage to the 2009 Maple Society of North America conference in Oregon, which included a tour of Buchholz & Buchholz Nursery. They hoped to meet the nursery’s owner, Talon Buchholz, who had introduced some of the Japanese maple selections they most admired.

Persons: Matthew, Timothy Nichols’s, Talon Buchholz Organizations: Society of North America, Buchholz Locations: Oregon

☆ For a Rainbow of Color in Winter, Look to the Willow
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-21 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Or maybe you’d like to produce bountiful harvests of leaves and twigs to feed livestock, or simply enliven a winter landscape with fiery color? Lisa Carper and Aric Vanselous have a willow for all of those purposes, and then some. In their trove of a nursery devoted to the genus Salix, they have several hundred species and varieties from around the world. In early 2019, Ms. Carper was browsing online for plants that might work well at the couple’s former New Jersey property. “We had a little wet patch on our four acres, and it was like, ‘What can we grow there?’” she recalled.

Persons: Lisa Carper, Aric, Carper, ”, “ Locations: New Jersey

☆ For a Ukrainian Gardener, Flowers Offer a Way Forward
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-07 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Clematis that delight Alla Olkhovska the most among the 120 or so types she grows are not the familiar, large-flowered hybrids, as extravagantly beautiful as they are. It’s the small, less frequently grown species — the ones whose common names often include the phrase “leather flower,” many of them native to the Southeastern United States — that have stolen her heart. The whiteleaf leather flower (C. glaucophylla) and scarlet leather flower (C. texensis), for example, can really take the heat, and just keep blooming and blooming, adapting to challenging environmental circumstances. Two years ago this month, a more sudden call to adapt was sounded — this one to the gardener herself, along with her fellow Ukrainian citizens. In Kharkiv, where she lives, and around the nation, war had arrived.

Persons: Alla Organizations: Southeastern United Locations: Southeastern United States, Kharkiv

☆ This Seed Season, Consider a Catalog That Takes a Different Approach
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-29 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

It takes a village, not a threshing machine, to complete the harvest of pounds of watermelon seeds that will fill the simple, white packets sold by Turtle Tree Seed. “Nobody minds helping with the watermelon-seed collection,” said Lia Babitch, the seed company’s co-manager. She’s not just talking about their crew: Residents of Camphill Village, in Copake, N.Y., where Turtle Tree is headquartered, are happy to join in. It’s a pretty sweet task, after all, that involves eating the fruit of yellow-fleshed Early Moonbeam, or perhaps an heirloom like Moon and Stars, and spitting the seeds into cups provided for that purpose — the first step before washing, drying and eventually packing them for sale.

Persons: ”, Lia Babitch, She’s Locations: Camphill, Copake, It’s

☆ What’s the Easiest Houseplant? Many Experts Will Give You One Answer.
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-08 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Such blends are typically heavy on the bark and may contain ingredients like sponge rock, coarse perlite and charcoal. If a plant’s leaves form a tank — the way Aechmea, Vriesia, Guzmania and Neoregelia do — add water into it, too. “I don’t have to fill up this thing,” Mr. Lara said of the earth stars, because their leaves don’t form a tank. “I just have to water the pot, which we’re all used to doing.”Misting is often recommended as the best way to water bromeliads grown bare root. But with Tillandsias in particular, Mr. Lara prefers dunking them in a bucket of water for a thorough soak.

Persons: Mr, Lara, Misting, Tillandsias

☆ If You Plant Milkweed, They Will Come. (And Not Just the Butterflies.)
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-25 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To see a field of common milkweed in midsummer — a sea of a thousand nodding pink flower heads — you would not imagine that anything could ever stand in the way of the genus Asclepias. Yes, common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), the most widespread milkweed east of the Rocky Mountains, can colonize disturbed sites and form impressive stands. But it is an exception among the more than 90 recognized North American species of milkweed, many of which often find it not so easy to continue making themselves at home. “The milkweed is a displaced citizen in its own land,” writes Eric Lee-Mäder in the opening of his new book, “The Milkweed Lands: An Epic Story of One Plant, Its Nature and Ecology.” “Where once it owned the continent, it’s now a kind of vagrant, occupying the botanical equivalent of homeless encampments.”As one example, he cites 2012 research, by John M. Pleasants of Iowa State University and Karen S. Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota, that estimates a nearly 60 percent decrease in the milkweed populations of the Midwest since 1999.

Persons: ”, Eric Lee, John M, Karen S Organizations: North, Iowa State University, University of Minnesota Locations: Rocky

☆ A Viable Alternative to Conventional Lawn? Cornell May Have Found One.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-13 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

It’s a grail of contemporary horticulture, a subject of inquiry for scientists and landscape designers alike: how to reinvent the estimated 40 million acres of lawn in the United States, shifting the emphasis toward native plants. Because traditional lawn care is, at its essence, a perpetual fight against biodiversity, a war conducted with mower blades and chemicals. All of the numbers — the gallons of water wasted, the tons of pollution generated — tell us to stop. But what should replace all of that mowed grass? The answer is not easy.

Locations: United States

☆ Forcing Bulbs Isn’t Hard. So Why Don’t More People Try It?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-06 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Before Page Dickey and Francis Bosco Schell spent a single night in their house in northwestern Connecticut, clay pots of flower bulbs slumbered there, setting down roots in a space of their own. The species tulips, miniature daffodils and dwarf irises that would grace the windowsills and dining table in late winter and early spring — after the couple’s yearlong renovation was complete and the December 2015 move-in day had arrived — were all present and accounted for. Ms. Dickey, a garden writer and designer and a founder of the Garden Conservancy Open Days program, and Mr. Schell, a retired book editor and lifelong gardener, knew there would be no parade of homegrown flowers in the leanest months if the bulbs didn’t get their needed chill period. That meant starting around October, so they could root and otherwise get ready. With that in mind, they had placed the pressing matter of building at least one cold frame (Ms. Dickey’s preferred bulb-forcing spot) near the top of their to-do list.

Persons: Page Dickey, Francis Bosco Schell, —, Dickey, Schell, Dickey’s Organizations: Garden Conservancy Locations: Connecticut

☆ A Quest Inspired by the Pandemic Seed Shortage and a ‘Primal Fear’
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When the pandemic lockdowns began, Jennifer Jewell, a garden writer and podcaster, was traveling on an East Coast speaking tour. “Quick,” they thought, “find a way home — and find seeds.”But like everyone that upside-down March three years ago, they were faced with the message “out of stock” on product after product, and catalog after catalog. At that point, it was not just the new pathogen that frightened Ms. Jewell. “It was a really primal fear of, ‘Wait a minute, if we can’t get seeds, we can’t eat,’” she recalled. “There was this visceral — human, mammalian, lizard brain, whatever you call it — fear,” she said.

Persons: Jennifer Jewell, John Whittlesey, “, Jewell, ” Organizations: East Locations: East Coast, Butte County, Calif, “

☆ Already Missing Summer? You Can Preserve It in Your Freezer.
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-23 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I freeze some herbs, including parsley, in more than one form: as pesto cubes and also in my go-to concoction that I call parsley logs. After it’s frozen, slice a disk or two from the end of the log as needed, and then wrap it back up and return it to the freezer. Compressed herbs that are frozen this way — I’ve done cilantro, chives and dill foliage, too — are easy to chop later, if desired. Peel, slice and bag it, and put it in the freezer, too. Store-bought or homegrown lemongrass, trimmed and cut up, can also be frozen — as can extra scallions.

☆ Why Are People Still Pressing Flowers? It’s a Form of Storytelling.
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-16 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My compulsion to garden vividly and expressively comes from Grandma Marion, who always made room for masses of marigolds and zinnias that echoed the colors of the Fiestaware on her pantry shelves. But she also handed down an appreciation for dried, pressed plants, which have a special kind of enduring beauty, faded though they may be. Two of what she called her “pressed-flower pictures” — pieces of her beloved garden arranged artfully on fabric under glass — hang in my upstairs hall. Lately, I’ve begun to feel that these mementos of a long-ago spring are trying to tell me something. So it’s no surprise that I feel a kinship with modern-day plant pressers like Linda P. J. Lipsen, the author of a new how-to guide, “Pressed Plants: Making a Herbarium.”

Persons: Grandma Marion, I’ve, it’s, Linda P, Lipsen, ”

☆ More Plants, More Life, More Pleasure: What Sets the Best Gardens Apart
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-09 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Changing Your Mind-SetAlthough many people worry that having a more ecologically responsible landscape means letting go of cherished plants — their peonies, perhaps, or roses — Ms. West and Mr. Rainer are quick to clarify. “It’s about letting things in,” Mr. Rainer said. Especially flowering plants — a win for people of all ages, and for wildlife. “Imagine your site being initially 100 percent covered in planting, at 18 to 24 inches tall,” Mr. Rainer suggested. “And then you go in and mow through the spaces you want — the paths, the terraces, everything else.”

Persons: Rainer, ” Mr, Mr, ” Locations: mow

☆ Painting With Light: This Garden Shows How It’s Done
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-02 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Is it time, gardeners, to really see the light? Navigating the sensory journey that is Innisfree Garden in Millbrook, N.Y., opens our eyes to how powerful a force light can be. And not just in making plants grow, or determining which ones are assigned to areas of sun or shade. Innisfree’s creators knew that light, when carefully considered, is among the most compelling design tools, capable of creating dynamic contrasts and establishing navigational clues. The light at Innisfree will move you through the garden — from bright, open spaces to narrower, darker ones — over and again.

Locations: Millbrook, N.Y

☆ Replacing Your Lawn? Instead of a Meadow, Consider a Food Forest.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-26 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Your first taste of a ripe pawpaw or persimmon can leave you hungry for more. That’s why Michael Judd is confident that he can persuade you to make room for several of these trees in your front yard — or even to surrender your lawn altogether. Turning your yard into a meadow or blanketing it in an expanse of alternative ground covers aren’t the only ecologically viable options for replacing conventional grass. Mr. Judd, an edible landscape designer and permaculturist, suggests you consider starting a homegrown food forest instead — perhaps a mix of easy-care, mostly native fruiting trees or shrubs and pollinator-attracting plant companions. But if you’re not ready to go that far, he’s flexible: A narrow strip along the fence line will do.

Persons: Michael Judd, Judd, you’re, ”

☆ Why a Tiny Trough Garden Always Attracts an Audience
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

These diminutive stars can be seen spilling out of pockets in a 35-foot-long rock retaining wall, in the gravel bed above it and, of course, in troughs and more troughs. Selling tiny plants may not be the mainstay of the business, “but it’s one cachet cow,” Ms. Chips joked. The nursery, in a bucolic setting that feels like an old garden, attracts a clientele that includes beginning gardeners and connoisseurs who come for the carefully curated selection and the depth of staff expertise. Ms. Spingarn built and planted the rock wall in the 1970s. The two were longtime employees of the previous owner, Mr. Duguid said, and aim to continue the nursery’s traditions.

Persons: Oliver, Chips, It’s, Oliver DNA, John Oliver, Eleanor Spingarn, Spingarn, Jed Duguid, Will Hibbs, Duguid Organizations: Oliver Nurseries, Rock Garden Society Locations: Connecticut

☆ Formal Landscaping With Native Plants? Yes, It’s Possible.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-05 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

The task facing anyone designing a garden: “We’re predicting the future — we’re seeing what’s not there.”That’s how Ethan Kauffman, the director (and lead soothsayer) of Stoneleigh, a public garden that opened five years ago on a historic estate in Villanova, Pa., puts it. The thing is, garden-makers also have to see what is there. In the case of the 42-acre Stoneleigh, that included seven acres of pachysandra, when Mr. Kauffman first saw the property almost seven years ago. In any context, a sea of what was once a go-to ground cover — which proved to be one of ornamental horticulture’s ubiquitous legacy invasives — would be overwhelming. But Mr. Kauffman, the former director of Moore Farms Botanical Garden, in South Carolina, was hired to fulfill a mission that makes it even more challenging.

Persons: what’s, Ethan Kauffman, Kauffman Organizations: Moore Locations: Villanova, Pa, South Carolina

☆ More Clematis, Please: How to Make Those Flowers Last All Season
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-28 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It’s hard to imagine that the aphorism warning about too much of a good thing could ever apply to Clematis, whose charming flowers and mostly lightweight climbing vines make them irresistible. Mr. Long has amassed a collection of more than 400 kinds of Clematis. He is quick to note, however, that you don’t need a collection the size of his to achieve a season-long Clematis display: It’s within reach of every garden. But it does require a strategic choice of varieties, based on staggered bloom times. You also have to master what Mr. Long calls the “refreshing techniques” that can coax maximum flowering.

Persons: Dan Long, . Long, Long Locations: Athens, Ga

☆ So Your Plant Is Sick? Here’s How to Get a Diagnosis.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-21 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Take the orange-and-black insects that were sitting on curled viburnum leaves and about to be exterminated. “That’s why we included a whole section of beneficials on the website,” Dr. Sadof said. The person in charge knew they were conifers, and therefore assumed that if they were alive, they would be evergreen — but dawn redwoods are among the few deciduous conifers. The key, these scientists agree, lies in cultivating our curiosity about what’s going on — even the nasty-looking stuff. “If you go in there with this attitude of ‘yuck,’” Dr. Beckerman said, “that’s the kryptonite of curiosity.”

Persons: “, ”, Sadof, Beckerman, ‘, ’

☆ Gardening Is Hard Work. Music Can Help.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Stoked by the energy of Brown and Green, my garden took root some 35 years ago. It was James and Al who accompanied me throughout its formative stages, always there as I wielded a boombox and case of cassettes alongside my long-handled shovel and loppers. What is a garden, really, but a real-life version of the hit track from James Brown’s 1970 “Sex Machine” album, pulsing with the actual birds and bees? This is motivational music at its best. Brown and Green kept me moving — if not dancing, exactly — shod in my first pair of proper gardening boots, which were, serendipitously, brown and green.

Persons: Brown, James, Al, James Brown’s, Green

☆ Why You Can’t Really Be a Gardener Without Mindfulness
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Marc Hamer was “the gardener,” someone who — for a portion of each day, over a career’s worth of years — knelt for hire, often pulling weeds. He knew that his employers in the big house, wine glasses in hand, would look out and see him in his posture of humility and perhaps say, “The gardener is here,” as if he were nameless and this was his only purpose on earth. But no matter. “It felt like prayer; it felt like I was actually humbling myself, bowing to the universe.”A garden is a place of work, yes. But for anyone with the soul of a gardener — no matter their level of expertise — it is also something else.

Persons: Marc Hamer, ”, —, Hamer Locations: Cardiff , Wales, “

☆ Quiet, Please: You Are Not Alone in Your Garden
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Spring unfolds each year in color, yes, but also in sound. And, regrettably, in noise — some of it emanating from our gardens. When Nancy Lawson, a Maryland-based naturalist and nature writer, speaks about the voices of frogs or birds, she uses the word “sound.” When she refers to humanity’s voice — the din of mowers, blowers and chain saws — she describes it as noise, specifically “anthropogenic noise.”Her definition: something that is “disrespectful of all the other sounds and runs roughshod over them,” she said, with “often unnecessary rudeness.”These days, we’re not just driving one another crazy with the racket that fills most neighborhoods. We’re “smothering some of the opportunities for animals to communicate through their senses,” she said, “to perceive the world through their senses.”

Persons: Nancy Lawson, ”, we’re, “ Locations: Maryland

☆ What Makes a Garden a Work of Art? Piet Oudolf Explains.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-24 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

There is a transcendent quality to the gardens of the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, which overtake us with the sense that we have arrived at a place where we would like — and very much need — to spend more time. Drawn into the complex textural mosaic of muted colors, we can exhale. And yet, Mr. Oudolf is quick to point out, his work is the art and craft of garden making. It is not ecological landscape restoration. His medium is naturalistic, yes, but it is not nature.

☆ ‘Compost Happens’ and Other Common-Sense Advice From Experts
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Margaret Roach | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When it comes to composting, where things break down — or don’t — is often where we get in our own way. We make the whole process too hard by fixating on details instead of the big picture. Commercial composting operations rely on those rules, and the science behind them, to produce material that is consistent and meets regulatory guidelines. We backyard composters can go a little easier on ourselves and still have great results, producing soil-improving bounty from our organic waste. Ms. Novak, who is also the founder and director of Growing Chefs, a field-to-fork food-education program, lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she composts in her backyard, too.

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