Our next Lost Lady of Garden Writing is Mrs. Francis King. She was the editor and sometimes the author behind all of the books in The Little Garden series published in the 1920s. Truth be told, she's not lost! Not like the other garden writers we've been looking for this summer. Mrs. Francis King was easy to find. In an article published by the New York Botanical Garden, they revealed that at one time she was considered "the fairy godmother of gardening". Quoting that … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Mrs. Francis King
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May Dreams Gardens
Garden Fairies Discover a New-to-Them Flower
Garden fairies here! We are garden faires and we have discovered a new flower in the containers on the patio. It's a flower we haven't seen around here in, like, never. Immediately, though we are busy and bedeviled with all kinds of garden tasks to do this summer, we went to work to figure out what it was. We sent Seedy and Soddy to the containers to take a closer look. Then we sent Honoria and Hortensis to Carol's library to start looking at books to find pictures. Meanwhile, the rest … [Read more...] about Garden Fairies Discover a New-to-Them Flower
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Frances Edge McIlvaine
Miss Frances Edge McIlvaine is our next Lost Lady of Garden Writing. As with the other lost ladies, at first I thought there wouldn't be much to find out about Frances, or Fannie as her friends called her. I knew, of course, that she'd written Spring in the Little Garden (1928), another book in the Little Garden Series edited by Mrs. Francis King, because I have it in my library. Otherwise, I'm not sure if our paths would have crossed. The Find a Grave website shows a rather plain … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Frances Edge McIlvaine
Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – June 2022
Welcome to Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for June 2022. Here in my USDA Hardiness Zone 6a garden in central Indiana, we've been enjoying a mostly mild spring which has caused the garden, and weeds, to explode with growth. In the middle of Plopper's Field, a little delphinium popped up next to some tall phlox. I don't remember planting the delphinium but when I went looking for a tag for another flower, I find the tag for it. It's Delphinium grandiflorum Delfix® Blue. Had I bothered to … [Read more...] about Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – June 2022
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Dorothy Giles
Continuing through the authors of The Little Garden Series of books (edited by Mrs. Francis King), we find our next Lost Lady of Garden Writing, Dorothy Giles, who wrote The Little Kitchen Garden (1926). Dorothy wasn't easy to find on the internet until I started to put "author" as part of the search term. Even that didn't serve up quite as much information as you would expect for an author who wrote at least eight books. I found some basic information about Dorothy Giles from a website … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Dorothy Giles
New Words for Different Types of Weeding
Say "weeding" in the presence of gardeners and watch their smiles turn to frowns. Then step back as they all begin to tell their favorite weeding stories, always using the verb "weeding." Well, let me add a little spice to the conversation by adding a few new verbs to describe the many different ways in which we weed. These are in no particular order. Teeding When you are tediously teasing out tiny weeds from amongst tiny plants, this is called teeding. An example of teeding is … [Read more...] about New Words for Different Types of Weeding
