Last spring, I introduced my garden admiration service. This spring, I'm going to teach you how to admire your own garden in five easy steps. If you take my advice and do each step in order, you'll be admiring your garden like a pro in no time at all. Here are the five steps. Step 1 - Provide seating. Every garden needs a seat or two placed where a gardener can sit a spell and admire the garden. In this step, all you need to do is grab seating of some kind—a chair, a bench, … [Read more...] about Learn to Admire Your Own Garden: In Five Easy Steps
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Crocus Seeds
Hark, what grows there in the lawn? Is it a weird fungus? No, it's the seed pod of a crocus. As the crocus seed pod opens up, it reveals these little seeds that remind me of radish seeds. Once they drop their seeds, the empty seed pods look like this. In a nearby flower bed, I see lots of seed pods forming. I'm going to keep an eye on them and collect some of the seeds when the pods open up. Then maybe I'll sow some of them just to see if I can get them to germinate … [Read more...] about Crocus Seeds
Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day – May 2022
Welcome to Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for May 2022. Here in my USDA Hardiness Zone 6a garden in central Indiana, it's suddenly hot like summer after a spring that never seemed to warm up. Now everyone and every plant seems to be in a big hurry to get settled before real summer arrives. I thought at one point that I'd try to see how many different pictures I could take that included violas in some form or fashion, like the picture above which includes columbine (Aquilegia sp.), Viola … [Read more...] about Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day – May 2022
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing – Ella Porter McKinney
As more irises begin to appear in the garden, I've found another lost lady of garden writing, Ella Porter McKinney, who wrote Iris in the Little Garden (1927). I will confess I didn't find very much information about Ella. Like other writers in The Little Garden series of books from the 1920s, she appears to have been involved with a local garden club—hers was in Madison, New Jersey—and the National Garden Club of America. I did figure out after many searches that she got married in … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing – Ella Porter McKinney
The Flowers of Mother’s Day
Walk the garden with me, and I'll show you the flowers of Mother's Day. Lily of the Valley We'll start with Lily of the Valley, Convallaria majalis. Some people consider it an invasive, spreading plant; others love it as shade-loving ground cover with a sweet-scented flower. I love it because we picked the flowers at my grandma's house in the spring, generally around Mother's Day, the second Sunday of May. I got my start of Lily of the Valley, just a few pips as they are called, from … [Read more...] about The Flowers of Mother’s Day
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Alice Harding
"No garden can really be too small to hold a peony. Had I but four square feet of ground at my disposal, I would plant a peony in the centre and proceed to worship." And thus we are introduced to another Lost Lady of Garden Writing, Alice Harding (Mrs. Edward Harding). Alice, as I'm going to call her throughout this blog post, was rather elusive for me to easily find information about her life until I did a search for "Alice Harding Plant." This eventually took me to an article about … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Alice Harding
