As various other people have noted, when you care about wildlife and the world, it’s easy to get depressed these days. I won’t lie to you, O Readers—lotta bad stuff going on out there, and it’s a short jump from “This is really depressing” to “and there’s not a damn thing I can do about [...]
Slaps and Medals
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In the lovely book of essays A Full Life in a Small Place, gardener Janice Emily Bowers wrote that in summer, the garden pins medals to her chest with one hand and slaps her across the face with the other. I was sitting in the airport when I read that line and laughed out loud, [...]
Pollinator Rebound
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It was almost exactly a year ago that I wrote about the distressing lack of bees in my wildlife garden. We had wasps and flies and beetles and wee little nameless beasties, but the bees—native and non-native alike—had gone missing. When I asked around, I found two camps—a few people who had a perfectly normal [...]
Agastache Forever!
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If you asked me to name my top five native plants, I would probably hem and haw and spend a lot of time counting on my fingers. One of them, however, would make the list with no problems—the fantastic genus Agastache. More commonly known as hyssop or hummingbird mint, boasting a dozen species, the odds [...]
Ten Days In Mid-March
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Ten days is a long time to be separated from one’s garden. But I had a road-trip of great family necessity, so I set off two weeks ago, armed with my TSA-approved shampoo bottles and a couple of bags of beef jerky, to make the long drive from Phoenix to Atlanta. It was a grim [...]
Talking Terroir
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Okay gang, today we’re going to talk about terroir. This has nothing to do with terror, terriers, or anything else in that genre. Terroir is a French word, which translates rather loosely as “the sense of a place,” and is used to describe the effect that climate, soil, other local plants, geography, etc has on [...]
Mulching in Hello Kitty Pajamas
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Okay, I give up. I admit defeat. I tried to go dormant in winter like a good gardener—like a sane gardener—but the garden will not let me. Sure, the main plants gracefully died back to stems, but they grew a suspicious fuzz of green around the base almost immediately. The lettuces finally succumbed to frost, [...]
My Garden Year In Review
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Well, it’s nearly New Years, and you know what that means—time for the plethora of Greatest Hits, Year in Review, Dire Predictions, and so on and so forth, and mine is no exception. Time to review how the year went in my home base, Squash’s Garden! Stuff Got Done I had a busy year. I [...]
Plowman’s What?
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One of the real knockout plants in my garden this year has been…this thing. I bought it at the local botanical garden, under the name “Plowman’s wort.” Okay, fair enough. It’s a native plant, it gets big pink compound flowers, I’m all for it. I bought it about this time last year, put it in [...]
Bulbs, Bulbs, and Possibly More Bulbs
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Today is October 29th, which is the feast day of St. Narcissus on the Catholic calendar. My Catholicism is so far lapsed now that I can see a nun without flinching*, but I was amused by the coincidence, as I have lately been planting bulbs. (St. Narcissus, it must be said, has nothing at all [...]
