MARGARET ROACH A WAY TO GARDEN

Patrick McDuffee believes that everyone should have at least one scented geranium on their windowsill year-round, for an on-demand invigorating whiff of fragrance, or to admire its colorful flowers…or to make a homebrewed cup of herbal tea from its leaves.... Read More ›

The last time I spoke to Alla Olkhovska from her home and garden in Ukraine, she confessed to growing about 120 different types of Clematis—a number that after seeing her recently published e-book “Clematis Passports,” which profiles 140 kinds, I suspect... Read More ›

On the weekend of Aug. 8 and 9, the beloved Seed Savers Exchange will celebrate its 50th anniversary of preserving our seed heritage with festivities at its homebase in Decorah, Iowa. I wanted to celebrate Seed Savers here a little, too,... Read More ›

For each of us, it’s probably safe to bet that our most familiar piece of the natural world is the outdoor space right beside the place we live – our own yard. But how well do we really know even... Read More ›

There may be no moment in the year when my friend Ken Druse and I are more grateful for the range of textures and colors of foliage we made room for in our gardens than we are right now –... Read More ›

Today’s guest returned from a 1979 trip visiting English gardens inspired to do some garden-making of his own. His canvas was a northwestern Connecticut hillside and not the Cotswolds, and the home he’d just purchased wasn’t a grand manor house... Read More ›

A couple of ravens have been shouting at each other across the garden each day this spring-into-summer, and their loud-mouthed antics reminded me of a somewhat less bawdy conversation about crows and ravens that I had a decade ago on... Read More ›

A big old copper beech tree is a focal point of my garden, and each time I look out the window at it admiringly these days, I feel the same love and gratitude I always have for its grandeur –... Read More ›

Today we’re going to do some pruning, but not the same old straight-forward kind. Instead we’re going to talk topiary, and its transformative powers – not just on the plant that is the subject that’s getting clipped, or on the... Read More ›

Some of us plant a row of particular annuals with the intention to cut them for bouquets in their moment of bloom – and some of us think bigger have a whole cutting garden within our landscape. I feel like... Read More ›

We may know one when we see it, but what word best describes an ecological landscape? Compared to traditional, more formal gardens, such native-plant-forward designs are variously labeled as looser, or naturalistic, or wildish—all perfectly accurate. Is there perhaps a... Read More ›

I’ve answered a lot of garden questions in my time as a garden journalist, but nobody has asked more of them than today’s guest—who’s also the person I’ve known longer than anyone else on the planet. My baby sister, Marion... Read More ›

Again and again, as I was reading the recent book “Bad Naturalist” by Paula Whyman, I kept thinking: Good thing I only have a couple of acres of land. Whyman tackled 200 acres on a Virginia mountaintop, dreaming of reshaping... Read More ›

The first issue of “American Gardener,” the newly redesigned member magazine of the American Horticultural Society, arrived recently, and in it are lots of good reads—including an article by today’s guest, Nancy Lawson, aka “The Humane Gardener.”  She writes about... Read More ›

When I first started gardening, it wasn’t unusual to hear other gardeners lamenting the shady areas of their landscapes – wishing for more, more, more sun. But my friend Ken Druse never looked at the lower-light areas that way –... Read More ›