Fellow Ranter, Anne Wareham, has this to say about dahlias:

“Sigh. I gave up on dahlias when I got fed up of deadheading them. And constantly forgetting which was bud and which was defunct flower. (please don’t tell me) Never mind trying to keep them warm in winter. And you have one in a pot, then next year it wants five pots! They get huge.

This is all, of course, true.  And I still love dahlias. I am enchanted by fat, touchable blooms that fill your wide-open hand, and gradually reveal gradations of color as the growing season winds down. I am energized by the late summer energy they miraculously bring to a garden, and intrigued by the extraordinary range of flower and foliage available to the modern gardener.

And I find I also love them in other people’s gardens much better than my own. 

Beautiful Tabasco…

To me, the most sumptuous and sexy of dahlias are much like Newfoundland dogs – gorgeous, extraordinary beasts I admire, but never wish to groom, feed, or protect from my Mid-Atlantic summers.   I am clear and honest in my assessment of these creatures – why can’t I be honest about dahlias?

The Temptation

Instead, I lie to myself that I am going to try this one, or that one, as I walk through other people’s gardens in late summer and autumn and find myself charmed by a perfectly placed ‘Café Au Lait’ or an aptly named ‘Tabasco’. I search for a tag, or inquire of the resident gardener, and then scribble the name down hopefully and performatively — even as I note their large heavy heads, and the practically invisible staking holding them back from the disgrace of those heads face down in the mud.

David Howard embarrassing himself at the party, as usual.

Instagram doesn’t help gardeners like me struggling with Dahlia Cognitive Disconnect. In fact, it is more than partially responsible.  In recent years, dahlias have become the poster child for social media bouquets. They fill a vase like nothing else, and if a gardener has been even slightly particular in choosing color tones and varying size and shape, he or she can put together a perfect arrangement with little effort.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself. But those vase-fodder dahlias are much better suited for a cutting garden with grid support than in a display garden that simply needs support. Any. Support.

The Technique

In my heart I know that I haven’t the patience for dinner-plate or even dessert-plate dahlias. I am selfishly happy to admire the efforts of others — particularly in gardens that are well-suited to the conditions they love: evenly moist, organically rich soils blessed with abundant sunlight.  I have the soil, but not the sun – and I don’t have the minions to manicure them.  

If you are a gardener with such a garden — and such minions — how can you say no to that late season color?  I’ve just been visiting gardens in Normandy after a very difficult season of drought, and precious water that was strategically spared for dahlias in flower borders and containers more than paid for the investment of time and energy needed to tend them.

Cafe Au Lait at Giverny in August

If you live a zone warmer than my valley (Z6b), and don’t have ravenous voles in the winter, there is even more reason to love them, as you will probably avoid the task of lifting the tubers after the first frost definitively ends the magnificent autumn display.  A nice top dressing of mulch or compost will give them extra protection – just mark where they lie so spring shovels don’t create mayhem.

In colder climes, a few plunges with a garden fork should reveal the treasure of a tuber clump – and if your soil was good and the weather was generous, you may have quite a few more than you started with. 

My method for storing these clumps is easy — and lazy — but it works for me. First, removal of last year’s foliage; next, a wrap with an old towel (as humidity regulator); and finally, into a plastic garbage or Ziploc bag depending on size.  Those will overwinter in my frost-free garage with almost no care until they are ready to be potted up again in spring.

Dahlias that I grow in pots simply come into the garage and I take care that the soil does not become desiccated – a little water every four weeks or so seems to do the trick. No rough division or sharp knives at this point in the process – now is simply the time to sleep.

The Truce

If you are confused by my admission of care, considering my earlier protestations, I can explain. Though I have given up on classic Instagram beauties, I’ll never stop growing single dahlias – or more specifically, single dahlias that sport bronze foliage, such as Mystic® ‘Illusion’ or ‘Magenta Star’.  They are nearly as lovely out of bloom as in bloom, and skipping the deadheading won’t betray me as the lazy gardener I am.

Mystic® ‘Illusion’ — now out of patent and harder to find, but an absolute joy in the garden.

As I wrote in Tropical Plants and How to Love Them,  “Nearing the end of the seasonal party, Dahlia pour another drink and settle in.” That’s what they feel like — comfortable friends making life richer. Yes, one must choose one’s friends wisely, lest they fall over the couch, or wreck the carpet; but I have found over the years that dahlias with single blooms never outstay their welcome. -MW

The Trouble with Dahlias originally appeared on GardenRant on September 3, 2026.

The post The Trouble with Dahlias appeared first on GardenRant.

Some time ago Charles wrote this piece for thinkingardens.  I think it’s worth revisiting.

Charles:

I can’t imagine how people who write about gardens keep going , when it is so clear that their words are really just padding to fill the gaps between the photographs.

Charles Hawes, working at Moor Wood.

 

The garden “stories” we read are utterly formulaic and bland, finishing invariably with some cliché about the gardens’ loveliness. We (the writers and the photographers) try and persuade ourselves that at least we are giving those creators of the gardens a warm glow of satisfaction for seeing their garden in print, looking, of course at its best (well, to be truthful, far better than its best). And of course we get a fee for our labours. We all have a living to make.

But I believe we are short changing the garden owners. No it’s worse than this, I think this universal approach to gardens by the media insults the gardeners and devalues their gardens, because we are totally failing to take them seriously.

One of his photographs out of thousands! Sissinghurst White Garden

 

As a photographer of a garden I probably spend about ten times the amount of time looking at a garden than the average visitor. A proper “shoot” will usually involve a lengthy walk around with the owner. Then I will photograph from late in the afternoon until dusk and then rise before dawn to get the first light. And then there could be several more hours walking round and photographing in the morning. And if the light is not satisfactory, a return visit may be called for.

I then spend hours looking at every picture on my computer (and I do think that this is, in some sense at least, a further study of the garden), making selections and adjustments, sometimes removing minor imperfections in a scene. (Some of my colleagues will remove TV aerials or telephone wires from a scene but I do not go this far for my own, nevertheless idealised, images).

I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I for one believe that I have a really good eye and I believe that over the years I have developed a real ability to see some gardens’ failures to make the most of their situation, or where a view might be improved by changes to existing hedges or additions of new ones. Or where a planting scheme can be improved. Or where the garden is getting over-full of ornament. Most people making a garden would, I believe, both be interested in and could well find that they would benefit from my feedback.

He doesn’t always flatter…. (Troy Scott-Smith. Head gardener, Sissinghurst, weeding)

 

But I would never volunteer this perspective and I am never asked for it. I don’t volunteer my opinions for fear of offending my host who may have provided me with a bed and a meal. I might also risk prejudicing their cooperation in the essential task that follows my visit of identifying the names of plants for my captions. And actually by the time I have completed the photographic task I am usually exhausted and ready to go and have a rest.

But why do garden owners never ask what writers or photographers think about what they have been looking at? I believe that anxiety is at the heart of it. There is the classic “you should have been here last week” syndrome. Garden owners want their gardens to be seen at their best and are hungry for praise. Indeed I don’t think that I am totally off the wall if I suggest that this need for praise is almost addictive. Because the garden can never be praised enough and yet such praise never satisfies the owner. Why? Because they know it is meaningless, empty, without sustenance. It is like feeding someone pure sugar.

Wyndcliffe Court, Monmouthshire, flattered by snow.

 

Taking a garden seriously and really discussing a garden with its creator is completely counter cultural. Doing so raises the anxiety of both the person sharing their views and that of the person hearing them. It is totally fraught. But such a process of taking a garden seriously also offers the possibility of the creators of gardens receiving a far more satisfying experience from garden writers and photographers. They could see their garden with fresh eyes. It offers, too, the possibility of entering into a “grown up” relationship between the makers of gardens and the garden media. At the moment it feels to me that all the garden media are doing is handing out sweeties.

Trying not to fall into the Wye.

 

How could we break this unsatisfying and pointless process? It could start by magazines commissioning proper garden reviews, with the commissioning editor asking their writer and the photographer to work together in presenting a more real view of the garden with a rather more analytic than descriptive approach. Analytic does not mean academic – think of book and theatre reviews. There is one journal which I think ought to take this on – the journal of the RHS, “The Garden”. This should be a serious journal; it is surely time it took its writing about gardens more seriously. If they were to lead I think perhaps others would follow.

But I also think that there is scope here for the book publishing industry to break the mould and offer us a book that takes gardens seriously by adopting such an approach.

That would truly be ground breaking.

Charles Hawes – Photographs with GAP

A Photographer has his say. originally appeared on GardenRant on August 27, 2026.

The post A Photographer has his say. appeared first on GardenRant.

In 1995, after 15 years, I closed Holbrook Farm and Nursery in North Carolina and moved back to Louisville, Kentucky. What was I going to do next? A cockamamie idea about making a documentary called the Four Seasons in Three Gardens came to mind. Funding would help. I figured I might have a little cachet in American horticulture, and I imagined Home and Garden Television (HGTV) would give me 15 minutes in person to make my pitch. I wanted to feature Clarence E. “Buddy Hubbuch,” a hero of mine. He worked at Bernheim Forest & Arboretum for 34 years. They didn’t take the bait.

Buddy Hubbuch and Mike Dirr, University of Georgia. Mike Hayman photo.

A fax arrived from HGTV, a few months later, stating clearly, “I urge you to stop calling and sending us new material.” I was one or two calls short of a cease-and-desist letter regarding a film proposal. Being cut down to size is humbling but not always shameful.

Plow on

In the 1970s I visited my father in an office he shared with his business partner. They had desks facing one another. Mr. Miller had framed diplomas from the Ivy League on his back wall. Dad had a framed penmanship award from Louisville Junior High School on his. He never lacked humility.

My father was a serial entrepreneur. He made and lost money but kept moving along. He sank the eight ball to win the game near the end of his career.

Dad faithfully encouraged me, without judgement, about various career ideas that started with saving the world, then to farming, and finally digging into horticulture.  The three have a lot in common. None of these are easy or lucrative career paths. He always knew someone I could talk to who might be helpful—from a Catholic priest, to a farmer, to a nurseryman. He rolled his eyes on the documentary idea. I don’t think he had been to a movie since the “Guns of Navarone” played at the Penthouse Theatre on 4^thStreet in 1961.

A lot has changed over the last year

I am 75 now and garden in the Salvisa like there is no tomorrow. Well, I am a little slower but feel okay and don’t want my age to feel like presentiment for cease and decease.

There was a lot to sort through during the move last fall. Unfortunately, one large box of correspondence full of 50 years of precious memories got tossed by mistake. Who writes letters anymore? By hand. Preserved were more than a dozen unedited Beta film tapes from 31 years ago. The Four Seasons in Three Gardens, my short-lived, ill-fated documentary filmmaker phase, sat on shelf and haunted me for years.

Happy endings

That same 1995, late in the year, Klaus Jelitto, founder of Jelitto Perennial Seeds, came to Louisville to court me. I was flattered and needed a job. A real job. What a blessing. I happily stuck around with Jelitto for 22 years.

The film project was abandoned. Most of it was dull as dirt. Years passed. I kept thinking I might find something worthwhile, if not cinematic, in these tapes. A moment of clarity jumped in front of me in late July.

Filmmaker Morgan Atkinson, who led the filming, converted one small portion to digital—Buddy Hubbuch’s 1995 retirement party. It was wonderful to watch again, though I didn’t walk away thinking that Morgan should add this to his impressive film oeuvre.

Filmmaker Morgan Atkinson

I emailed the raw digital segment to Chuck Hubbuch, Buddy’s son, who a few weeks ago shared it with his sisters. Chuck had a successful career in horticulture, also. He was not at his dad’s retirement party. Chuck was collecting plants in Thailand for the Fairchild Botanic Gardens.

A bit of background about Buddy

A year-long internship at Kew Gardens awaited me at summer’s end in 1978. I spent the months before at Bernheim. Buddy was not impressed. I was the arboretum’s weed guy. A low rung on Bernheim’s ladder. Show me what you got. I worked alone, kept my head down, my mouth shut, took notes, pressed leaves, and soaked up as much of Buddy’s wisdom as I could.

One rainy day, two months into a particularly muggy summer, I realized I had begun to gain trust. Instead of sending me home for the rest of the day, Buddy invited me to his office and let me look through his garden library. We talked. A little. Our brief conversation felt like a commencement graduation. We kept in touch for years afterward.

Buddy Hubbuch had many friends and admirers

The gifted and generous horticulturist gave 34 years to Bernheim Forest & Arboretum. Buddy was free with advice or opinions for anyone who showed curiosity about plants or nature. He was an amateur naturalist, interested  in native plants, animals and geology. His son, Chuck, said, “When I was young, he brought home all sorts of insects, reptiles, birds, small mammals, interesting rocks and fossils.”

Few could match Buddy’s  infectious laugh or his handsome thick mane of silver hair.

Buddy never blew his horn.

Buddy and J.C. Raulston from North Carolina State University. Mike Hayman photo.

Early in one film segment, when I asked what his favorite tree was, Buddy responded, simply. “I love them all.” The answer was followed by a long pause. Brevity and humility, on camera, didn’t translate to an overwhelming enthusiasm for trees and shrubs. If you dug a little deeper, you’d find out he was obsessed with  hollies. He could go on for days.

“The holly collection became one of the country’s largest with over 400 hollies, including over two hundred different species and cultivars. It has deservedly attained a national and even international reputation for excellence. Buddy developed a new holly, Ilex x attenuata, ‘Marilyn’ a fine-textured evergreen holly with striking red-orange fruit that he named in honor of his wife.” Mathew London photo; bernheim.org

Plow on.

HGTV blew me off, and I am good with that. I suspect only insiders would understand Buddy’s quiet and significant historic significance anyway.

A sense of completion, relief, and joy finally settled over me when I emailed the short film piece a few days ago to a group of friends who knew Buddy. Some worked with him before launching their own careers.

I have watched the unedited, sometimes tedious, hour-long clip of Buddy Hubbuch’s retirement party a half-dozen times, and it has never failed to trigger nostalgic feelings and smiles.

What a wonderful man.

Plow on.

Here’s a YouTube link to the retirement party.

https://youtu.be/srRa3Zap_B8

When you get there, press CC for closed captions.

Humbled, but Plowing On originally appeared on GardenRant on August 26, 2026.

The post Humbled, but Plowing On appeared first on GardenRant.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden’s famous Meadow when I visited in July, past its spring flowering. 

In this third and last post from my recent trip to California, I cover the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, the mind-blowing challenges of fire-safe landscaping, and some favorite images of Santa Barbara’s architecture and beach. (I covered Lotusland here, and residential gardens in a Los Angeles suburb here.) 

Santa Barbara, about 95 miles up the coast from Los Angeles, is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its Botanic Garden, which happens to be the first in the U.S. to use native plants exclusively.

I’m inspired by the garden’s mission – by aesthetic, educational and scientific means, to conserve native plants and habitats and showcase the state’s diversity on its 78 acres.  The garden’s 1,000+ species represent all 11 ecoregions of, to my surprise, not the State of California but the California Floristic Province, which stretches from southern Oregon to Baja California in Mexico. Areas of the garden are laid out by habitat.  (Kudos for avoiding the problematic practice of grouping plants solely by political boundaries.)

Its Iconic Entry Meadow

The Meadow in spring. Photo credit: Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.

I learned that one of its co-designers was the famous landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and it seems pretty prescient of them to recommend this plan for the large entry meadow, in 1939: “Eliminate bermuda grass meadow.  Replace temporarily with annual and perennial wildflowers. Should this experiment prove successful, it might be successful to turn it into a permanent feature.  Otherwise, the area could be planted with native strawberries.” Indeed it was covered in strawberries at some point in its history.

Then in the early 2000s the 1.5-acres were planted in large perennials like sages and grasses, with California poppies creating a superbloom. Here’s lots more about the Meadow – its history, plants and maintenance challenges.

More than a plant collection

The garden has a bigger mission than even the website touts. It’s working to “shape the region into a biodiversity hot spot by encouraging residents to plant native plants and working with local communities and governments to spread the gospel.”  Source. 

The garden includes its own nursery, where hundreds of species of California natives (especially those most threatened with extinction) are grown, then sold to visitors.

Research is conducted in the garden’s genetics lab to understand what plants need protection, and a vital research focus is studying fire-combustion to find the best California natives for fire defense.  

My Tour

My guide at the garden was an old friend from garden-writer meet-ups – Billy Goodnick, the landscape architect,  author, television garden educator and drummer in a rock ‘n roll band. 

In this photo he’s showing me a stunning patch of Matilaja Poppy (Romneya coulteri), an aggressive perennial.

I’m a sucker for cool benches like this one.

Real California redwoods. 

One of the garden’s  educational goals is pursued through its demonstration Water Wise Home Garden.

(But first, readers may know a pet peeve of mine is over-generalization in garden-writing, and this sign is a good example of correct and incorrect descriptions of native plants.  In the lower left it says “The beautiful, easy to grow and water thrifty native plants selected for this garden….”  On the right it omits any qualifier and simply declares that “Native plants need less water, have fewer pests, and require less upkeep.” Even in California, not all native plants need less water – it’s a myth debunked here.  You know who’s hurt by this kind of misinformation? Customers and people trying to make a living growing and selling natives. Okay, end of rant.)

Now about this demonstration garden, honestly as an Easterner it’s hard for me to imagine using plants with such a muted color palette. I assume I’d adjust if I actually lived and gardened there for a while, and maybe even learn to love it.

The region has always been fire-prone. It’s just getting worse.

Santa Barbara sits on a coastal shelf below the Santa Ynez Mountain range, which is dominated by a chaparral plant community that has evolved to burn naturally, so fires have occurred there basically forever.  It only became the catastrophic challenge it is today since humans started building homes there, especially using such flammable materials, right in the path of the inevitable wildfires.

Billy Goodnick has seen up-close 6 to 8 major wildfires since he moved there 40 years ago, and there have been hundreds more. 

The risk of wildfires is old news to Californians but last year’s horrific fires in the Los Angeles area brought 24-hour coverage of fires and the need for fire-safe homes and landscapes. It’s no surprise that insurance companies are working on adding fire-safe design requirements to their coverage.

(Some members of my family were evacuated for months; others came very close to being evacuated. So I can’t even imagine living there, even for low humidity and all-year gardening.)

What IS fire-safe landscaping (a/k/a firescaping) 

Like the life-long learner that he is (and keeping up his landscape architect certification), Billy has enrolled in classes about the latest in fire-safe landscaping, where he learned that the most effective fire-safety measures that homeowners can take are improving the home – it’s called home hardening.

But there’s lots to do in the garden to make it safer from wildfires. The basics of fire-safe landscaping are:

• Create a defensible space near the house by keeping trees, shrubs and other sources of biofuel and garden furniture away from the house.  That includes wood mulch. (Use stone or gravel instead.) Taller plants should be installed farther from structures.  
• Spacing matters. Stop fire in its tracks by creating spaces between plants and breaking up large swaths of plantings.
• Manage the landscape – with adequate irrigation to keep plants hydrated, and keeping the garden free of dead plant material, weeds, etc. 

Images from UC Marin Master Gardeners video of traditional foundation plantings (top) and fire-safe gardens (below).

Big change for home garden design! Rethinking lawns, irrigation, tidiness and plant choices, too. 

I find this challenge SO fascinating, and found this video illustrating with images like the ones above how different fire-safe landscapes are from traditional gardens. What got my attention is the mention of a likely new requirement that only “fire-safe” plants be installed within five feet of the home or other structure and nothing at all within one foot. Though that’s not required yet, designers are smart to be learning alternative designs to traditional foundation plantings, as seen in the top image above.  

And I learned from the botanic garden’s website of another problem they’re facing: “Misperceptions of California’s native plants as fire-hazardous lead some gardeners to resist using native plants in defensible-space landscaping.” The garden’s classes for home gardeners are offered to dispel that notion and help residents be safer, and the research into fire combustibility of native plants should help steer gardeners’ choices.

I asked Billy if fire-safe and water-wise landscaping are compatible, and his response was ” In some ways, yes. Plants with long tap roots are both water-wise and fire-wise, but they may call for different design techniques.” It’s complicated!

I found a perfect example of how complicated it is in a video by WaterWise Santa Barbara about Fire-Wise Landscaping and Maintenance. It follows the narrator as she walks through the Botanic Garden’s demonstration Water Wise Home Garden, pointing out all the things that need to be fixed! Wrong plants in the wrong places, especially.

And just this week I saw a new story about a Sacramento resident getting a grant from the city to plant a native garden, then receiving a $900 fine from the very same city for creating a fire hazard by growing those plants. (It was mainly Stipa pulchra, the “official state grass.”)  

Not exactly wildlife gardening, is it?

Fire-safe practices, like having a “well-irrigated lawn,” sure clash with the wildlife-friendly practices we’re being taught.  But a green lawn IS an excellent buffer zone for fire. Brown lawns, not so much. 

(Billy’s a big proponent of having only the lawn you really need and instead of typical turfgrasses, using a low-water groundcover that can take some getting stepped on. His favorites are native grasses or sedges, which – fair warning – won’t look good in hot weather.  But hey, our Eastern turfgrasses don’t, either.)

Blue gramma grass in the demonstration Water Wise home at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.

More fire-safe practices that conflict with gardening for wildlife? Removing all plant debris and weeds, pruning regularly, creating spaces between plants, and keeping the garden tidy. Meadows, prairies and  savannahs are off the table.

Billy reminds me that fire-wise gardening advice is relevant well beyond Santa Barbara, to other fire-prone areas and those that may be fire-prone sooner than you think. 

A bit more Santa Barbara – architecture and the beach!

Santa Barbara’s most popular historic landmark is its County Courthouse. Completed in 1929, the Spanish-Moorish masterpiece features hand-painted ceilings, grand murals, and an 80-foot clock tower with panoramic city and ocean views. 

It’s worth listening to a docent inside. The murals depict the history of Santa Barbara.

From the Courthouse Tower there are great views in every direction. From these two you can see the dominance of Spanish Colonial architecture.

 

Not JUST Spanish Colonial

 

I walked to the Courthouse from my hotel in the heart of the old downtown, which is restored and super-lively. I skipped the nightlife but followed Billy’s recommendation to find examples of the work of architect Jeff Shelton, called the city’s “architectural wizard.”  Instead of taking the Walking Tour of his works, I hunted them down on a one-gear, foot-brake-only bike I borrowed from my hotel.

Above are two examples of Shelton’s work in downtown Santa Barbara. On the left is one that I couldn’t find – Cota Street Studios.  The Ablitt Tower on the right is his most famous work, but hard to photograph from the street. So here’s the photo credit for both of these. 

And here’s my photo of an amazing residence by Shelton, named Vera Cruz.

And finally, did I make it to the Pacific Ocean during my whirlwind trip to SoCal? Just barely, thanks to that clunker of a hotel bicycle, which took me down to the beach and along its wonderful pedestrian/bike paths. They reminded me of Santa Monica’s iconic path along the ocean. Both offer great beach access and views thanks to their prohibitions against building anything between the ocean and the highway. 

View of Santa Barbara’s beach from a pier.

Thank, Billy!

I’m afraid if I rave too much about what a great guide Billy was for my first visit to his fair city, readers will be hitting him up for similar help. But seriously, he went all out – helping me plan my visit, guiding me through two major gardens, treating me to breakfast (with wife Lin!), and arranging for a private tour of Lotusland.  

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and is fire-wise gardening compatible with wildlife-friendly, water-wise gardening? originally appeared on GardenRant on August 23, 2026.

The post Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and is fire-wise gardening compatible with wildlife-friendly, water-wise gardening? appeared first on GardenRant.

Lucy Allen comes to GardenRant this week from Substack, and from a sweltering and very dry United Kingdom. –MW

I know. We are all far too hot. But I am going to talk about it, all the same.

During this latest heatwave – flipping through magazines; trying to sit indoors instead of going into the garden – I found I couldn’t ignore a little voice that’s been in the back of my head for a while.

I’m really really bored of Piet Oudolf. There, I said it. It’s a terrible thing to admit. And I live within a stone’s thrown of Scampston, too, which is widely hailed as one of his triumphs.

It may be I’m being unfair. Perhaps what I really mean is, I’m bored of people who imitate Oudolf without his talent. And I do think the heat has shaped my reaction. When it’s as hot as this, grass bleaches out. Its movement mimics the optical effects of the heat shimmer you get over concrete or tarmac in the baking sun. Where grasses are over-used, or used with too many similarly vertical, floaty growers – Verbena bonariensis comes to mind, or Persicaria – the whole impression is of scribbled uprights, like a child’s drawing.

A brilliant, polemical and persuasive Substack post by Ben Probert discusses the implications of gardening in the heat; his dissection of the ‘macho’ culture of professional horticulture rang absolutely true for me (I am undendingly glad that I didn’t have to navigate the last few weeks of pregnancy working in 40°C/104°F heat in a polytunnel, which I’m fairly sure I would have been doing in my previous job).

He points out that many ‘so-called climate change gardens’ are devoid of trees, which I think is a particular weakness of the school of Oudolf rip-off designs (not Oudolf himself!). Dan Pearson, a year or so ago, discussed how he deals with the very un-Mediterranean challenges of UK gardens that are both wet in winter and hot in summer. But a lot of gardens I’ve seen in magazines recently have been heavy on perennials, billows of grasses, and very minimal amounts of anything else.

Heat flattens everything, visually ironing out the dappling of shade and the lushness of water caught in leaves and buds. When much of your planting is all happening at the same height, it can add to this deadening effect, giving you nowhere to relax and rest your eyes, nowhere to escape the feeling of relentless heat.

In my garden, I’ve realised that the space that is making me happiest in this heatwave is influenced by gardens much, much older than any modern ideas about climate-adapted ways of planting. The place where I sit in the garden is underneath a fig tree, which I pruned so that its branches make a shade canopy over my chair and little table.

A grape vine tangles into the branches on one side, and romps across the wall behind, until it makes common cause with a honeysuckle. I didn’t plant them together with any thought for it, but in the Old Testament, the epitome of peace and security is a garden where “every man shall sit under his vine and his fig tree.”

Not pristine or trendy, but it is very, very shady and cool.

The other planting is less Biblical, more medieval. There’s a wall-trained pear tree, and underneath it a green mass of lemon balm, which I just hack back with shears a few times a year to keep it in order. There is flowering lavender spilling over the stones that separate the border from this seating space, but there’s no formal hardstanding [hard surface]: just stony soil, punctuated with bits of creeping trefoil, purple thyme and self-seeding mint.

It’s not at all a ‘smart’ seating area – which, according to the magazines, requires an expanse of beautifully even, blindingly bright stone paving in a crisp geometric shape – but it does have the advantage of not looking weirdly sterile.

In this haphazard carpet of herbs, the runaway success has been chamomile ‘Trenague’. This very simple little plant has surprising tenacity in drought. When almost everything else goes crispy or thin, it stays green and soft, and when you tread on it, you get a waft of delicious apple scent.

It mixes with the herbal smell of the golden oregano that runs through the borders nearby, which produces a great sweep of fresh colour and keeps the roots of plants around it cool and damp. I especially like it swirling underneath my rose ‘Darcey Bussell,’ which is a dark cerise pink, and setting off the iridescent blues of Pentstemon ‘sour grapes’.

‘The Garden of Paradise,’ Frankfurt: Städel Museum, c. 1410-1420

 

The idea of planting scented herbs underfoot is very medieval; likewise the idea of a garden that is not open, flat grasses and perennials, but an enclosure with green walls and overhanging trees.

The dominant colour is green – green fig-leaves; green vines. I think we’ve been persuaded, by the current fashion, to assume green gardens cannot thrive in the heat. But all those green leaves covering the wall help to cool it, preventing it from reflecting back the baking sun. All those soft green herbs on the ground hold the moisture in the soil. And those varied leaf shapes and heights – the flat fig leaves curling out almost horizontally; the vines racing upwards; the chamomile spreading cool on the ground – are not just visually soothing in their variation. As each leaf transpires, sending out water vapour, it adds complexity to the interplay of air currents that move and cool the spaces between the plants – the way a uniform planting of grasses and prairie plants cannot.

There’s something deeply appealing about a green garden that resembles the cool, shady spaces of a medieval illumination. I’m beginning to wonder whether, in fact, it might carry more potential for the future than the fashion that has come to dominate modern garden spaces. What do you think?

Do We Really Want More Prairie Gardens in a Heatwave? originally appeared on GardenRant on August 14, 2026.

The post Do We Really Want More Prairie Gardens in a Heatwave? appeared first on GardenRant.

It’s not always delightful, being in the garden at the moment here in Wales.  We have severe drought. You may find plants in sudden collapse, certainly not happy, and the heat and humidity are horrid. But at night it cools and there is pleasure to be had. 

I’ve been experimenting with taking photographs – on my phone – at night. Or in the gloaming, when suddenly things can get wonderfully atmospheric. (A bit like our otherwise rather uneventful eclipse was)

That wasn’t taken on any special setting, though my phone makes decisions all of its own. But there may have been light coming from the house. The interesting bit that I want to share is that I take a photograph without the least idea what I’m doing or how it will turn out. And I haven’t edited any of these except sometimes to chop a bit out. So, presumably, you could have fun too, finding out what you get, and that it can sometimes be quite magical.

Skies can be good:

Then there’s the strange things that happen to colour:

Almost like daylight, but mysteriously not quite.

White is suddenly important.

 

But may go pink.

Any available light suddenly becomes important

And sometimes I get something wrong and still love the result.

But sharp is good too.

And then it gets truly dark

 

You may need a torch by now, and that adds to the fun. Though the torchlight is  likely to be very random, given you’re taking pics too. It gets a bit of a handful and something may get dropped. On my phone you can make a setting in photos so that saying ‘cheese’ (or whatever else you fancy) will trigger a pic. That helps!

 

House lights can look good.

And we mustn’t forget the recently abused moon: (someone ploughed into it)

or, indeed, the friends you may meet outdoors at night. There seems to be always one there to greet me!

Take your Camera out at Night originally appeared on GardenRant on August 13, 2026.

The post Take your Camera out at Night appeared first on GardenRant.

GardenRant welcomes back garden ecologist Nathan Lambstrom, in Part III of a three-part series discussing invasive species rhetoric, and the negative effects powerful war metaphors have had on the perception and management of exotic and invasive plant species in our gardens and greater ecoregions.  The first installment explored the roots of this language; the second examined the tangible harm it can cause, and the last considers a more helpful way to think about, talk about, and interact with these species going forward. – MW

Over the last half century, the field of invasion biology acquired a vocabulary of war metaphors which inspired passionate action and were easy to communicate. The field grew as the message was spread; but as our understanding of how invasive species interact with novel ecosystems has grown, the hyperbole has become increasingly harmful.

Many ecologists, conservationists, and gardeners are advocating a shift in both the language we use about these species and the attempts to eradicate them at all costs. It is high time we move past the war on invasive species, abandon a militaristic vocabulary of pre-judgment, and embrace curiosity about these plants, even as we attempt to manage the changes associated with them.

If we dispense with the neat and tidy language of invasiveness, what are we left with? We still need to communicate about species that spread rapidly and exhibit competitive behavior; and it is still instructive to distinguish between species that evolved here and species that were recently introduced from somewhere else.

Passengers, Not Drivers of Change

One of the root problems of invasive rhetoric is that it gives too much agency to plants, framing them as insidious villains on the attack. To talk about them in this way ignores the conditions that led directly to their thriving: colonization and plant introductions; industrial agriculture; habitat fragmentation; ecological degradation; fire suppression; etc.

What we need is language that reflects the reality that these species are symptoms of a disturbed ecosystem, not monsters causing harm.

We have short memories. For instance, we see a forest with a thick understory of buckthorn and imagine that the forest was in a high-quality condition with diverse native flora in the not-too-distant past until the buckthorn came in, relatively recently, and took it over.

What we don’t see is millennia of careful management by Indigenous people that created many of those high-quality landscapes we imagine as natural (Rice 2025), and we don’t see the European colonization that put a stop to those practices.

Consider Land-Use History

Centuries of fire suppression, logging, grazing, plowing, and habitat lost to development (all major forms of disturbance) combined with the plant introductions created the perfect conditions for plants like buckthorn to thrive.

In most cases the native plant communities were lost long before the invasive species established a presence. When we blame the buckthorn directly, we are confusing correlation for causation.

The buckthorn didn’t create the damaged landscape or wipe out the native flora; it is an indicator of previously wrought damage. And if we do nothing to address the underlying conditions that allowed it to thrive or to reintroduce the plant community that was lost, removal alone is unlikely to do much in the way of restoration (Lambstrom et al. 2022).

An oak woodland with a rich understory of herbaceous native plants; an oak woodland with a dense shrub layer of buckthorn after centuries of agricultural land use and suburban development (author photo).

Remember Root Causes

Far better to refer to these plants with language that reminds us of their root causes and accurately describes their behaviors. When we call a plant “introduced” instead of non-native or the more troubling “alien” or “exotic”, we stress that the plant did not come here of its own volition. It was introduced to this environment as a direct consequence of colonization, and we would do well to remember the ecological impacts of colonization that have allowed that plant to thrive.

Learn Plant Life Strategies

To stress a plant’s behavior, we can return to our friends the ruderals (described in Part I). Ruderals, if you remember, thrive on disturbance, have a short lifespan, and produce copious seed. Most of the plants we traditionally think of as weeds can also be described as ruderals. It is one of three life strategies proposed by J. Philip Grime to describe plant behavior in his seminal book, “Plant Strategies and Vegetation Processes” (Grime 1979).

A modified version of J. Philip Grime’s life strategy triangle.

Plants are categorized based on how they respond to stress (e.g. lack of nutrients or water) and disturbance (plowing, grazing, fire, etc.). A plant that thrives on low stress and high disturbance is ruderal, like garlic mustard or the biennial black-eyed Susan. One that thrives on low stress (fertile habitats) and low disturbance is competitive, like mugwort or Canada goldenrod.

Competitors tend to be longer-lived and spread clonally to form large patches. Plants that thrive on high stress and low disturbance are stress tolerant (long-lived plants like saguaro cacti), biding their time in extreme environments until they’ve accumulated enough resources to reproduce. Most of the plants we think of as invasive fall on the ruderal-competitor spectrum.

Viola pedata, a native stress tolerator, establishes healthy populations under high stress, low disturbance conditions (author photo).

What Can We Say Instead?

My preference lately is to refer to these plants as “competitive introduced” species. I have colleagues who prefer “disruptive introduced” or “harmful introduced.” Some Indigenous conservation leaders prefer the term “displaced plant relatives,” as a way to honor the inherent value that these plants have as living beings that are sharing our home (Hernandez 2022, Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi 2021).

What all of these terms do better than “invasive” is more accurately describe both origin and behavior. Perhaps when we call a plant a “competitive introduced” species, as opposed to a competitive native one, it also reminds us that competitiveness or ruderalness are traits not restricted to introduced species.

A competitive patch of Canada goldenrod in a meadow should be managed much as a patch of introduced mugwort would be. Remembering that their behavior is linked to the land use context in which they live can help remind us that these are not evil monsters, they are competitive plants thriving in an abused landscape, regardless of origin.

Greenbriar, a competitive native plant that has filled this woodland understory following centuries of agriculture and grazing (author photo).

Looking Forward

None of this means that wild native plants in North America could all be replaced with “invasive” plants without consequence, nor is there any realistic likelihood of that happening. Native plants are extremely important and are the foundation of wild terrestrial food webs. I say that as often as I can and will continue to plant, promote, study, and enjoy native plants. I will also continue to advocate for a shift in perspective, away from pre-judgment of introduced competitive plants, and towards curiosity and thoughtful stewardship.

When I see an area with abundant knotweed, buckthorn, bittersweet, or garlic mustard (or any number of native competitive plants like grapes or smilax) I no longer see a landscape ruined by an aggressive interloper. I see a neglected ecosystem in need of care and careful stewardship.

The landscapes closest to us and most affected by us thrive when we develop a close, intimate relationship with them. That means taking a step back and answering clearly: What is the right goal for this place? What is feasible? What is the long-term plan? And sometimes: would I react differently to this plant if it were native?

Sometimes the answers to those questions will lead us to remove introduced plants and establish a new plant community. Sometimes simple observation will be the right course of action, watching to see how new ecological connections unfold. Sometimes the right way forward will be a more selective tending, a careful and loving gardening of wild spaces.

We are a gardening species. We have been moving plants around and tending them for as long as we’ve been human. That tendency has certainly created some challenges, but it’s also created a lot of beauty and ecological value, both of which are ignored or dismissed as unnatural by invasive species rhetoric.

I believe that we’re at the threshold of a major shift in the way we think about, speak about, and manage these species, but to paraphrase the plant ecologist Michael Yadrick, “we do not need a kinder way to talk about a harmful system; we need a new system.”

The way we’ve been taught to view invasive plants is unscientific and harmful, both rhetorically and in terms of real consequences for wild plants and animals. We ought to approach them with curiosity, as a unique opportunity to witness firsthand how new species integrate into ecosystems. If we look closely, we can develop a more nuanced view of plant ecology and see the chaotically beautiful ecosystems around us not as battlegrounds, but as opportunities to develop deep relationships with our neighbors in the plant world, no matter where they’re from.

Nathan Lambstrom, MS
www.gardenecology.us

Introduced rugosa rose and native Eastern redcedar forming a novel plant community in southern Rhode Island (author photo)..

References

Grime, J. Philip. Plant strategies and vegetation processes, and ecosystem properties. John Wiley & Sons, 1979.

Hernandez, Jessica. “Invasive Species as a Metaphor for Colonization.” Rewilding Magazine, 16 June 2022, www.rewildingmag.com/invasive-species-as-a-metaphor-for-colonization/. Accessed 10 Apr. 2026.

Lambstrom, Nathan, et al. “Low passive restoration potential following invasive woody species removal in oak woodlands.” Restoration ecology 30.4 (2022): e13568.

Rice, Stanley A. Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and what We Can Learn from it. Simon and Schuster, 2025.

Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi. “Planting Moon in a Warming Climate.” Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi, 11 May 2021, www.wakantipi.org/wta-blog/2021/5/7/planting-moon-in-a-warming-climate-pzhkr-cfs8j-yeyez. Accessed 10 Apr. 2026.

The War on Invasive Species. Part III: Embrace Curiosity originally appeared on GardenRant on August 7, 2026.

The post The War on Invasive Species. Part III: Embrace Curiosity appeared first on GardenRant.

The title of this post tells you it won’t be a happy one. It might even make you angry. I wrote it just for blog readers – gardeners! Not to rally locals to take sides. I’ve waited a few weeks to calm down and get some perspective, but I’m not totally there yet and I hope that sharing the story will help. 

The background

As last reported in this post I worked for over 2 years to clear the jungle that a prominent city garden had become. It’s shown above in the condition it was when I got to work – not terrible from this view, but lots of blank spaces close to the sidewalk.

But these other views of the garden reveal the invasive vines and other nuisance plants that got my attention (though clearly not the attention of the city’s landscape crew). I couldn’t resist taking on the job of clearing the English ivy from trees – it’s SO gratifying!

The garden is dominated by over 50 old oakleaf hydrangeas, all of which miraculously survived our worst droughts (so far), despite the lack of irrigation or supplemental watering of any kind. The sight of them in this condition is cringe-worthy, but I sure couldn’t carry enough water to make a difference. 

Packera aurea donated by the garden club – just planted, and as they appear blooming in my garden. They bloomed their very first spring.

With most of the vines and other weeds gone, I and other volunteers planted Packera aurea donated by the local garden club – planted with the permission of the city staffer in charge.   

Recent destruction and dismissal

Since our planting day last fall, the new plants survived our bad winter and were just starting to bloom when one morning I found them all gone! Also gone were the volunteer redbuds I’d grouped into a small grove. 

So what happened? Long, awful story short, the person who gave us permission was gone and the landscape crew, believing the new plants to be weeds, removed them all (despite the blooms).

Well, we reported it and after several months we have the outcome – which is NOT that the club is being reimbursed for the plants, or that the mistake is forgiven because now we’re collaborating with the landscape crew to make this important garden even better. 

Nope! We were told by email that we had permission to keep removing invasives but that “Moving forward, new plantings will be the horticulture crew’s responsibility.”  

Maybe I too emotionally invested

This is a garden I’d checked on almost daily, imagining improvements like using hosta and Solomon’s seal divisions to fill in the empty spaces – at no cost, just volunteer labor. And adding some donated black-eyed Susans (our state flower) for long-lasting summer color.

But my reaction to that (imho, disrespectful) email has surprised me. I was SO hurt and angry I told the others to respond because I needed to step back from volunteering for the city, for my peace of mind.

I even stopped walking by the garden! I dread seeing the remaining bits of grape vine (that grows a foot a day, or seems to) smothering the hydrangeas again, and covering the old viburnum I’ve been lovingly renewal-pruning, a years-long process. I’m not sure I’m a big enough person to continue that work now.

So I’m wondering how to care less? I’d lost a garden before (by moving away after 26 years), but this loss comes with a complicated mix of hurt and anger. 

What’s in store for that garden now?

The black-eyed susans we offered for the site were rejected with no explanation, except that they would be appropriate in the large (and largely unmanaged) pollinator garden in a city park.

So with the Packera aurea destroyed and the black-eyed susans rejected, what plants DID the city have in mind for this very prominent garden? A quick look at what they’re planting in other city gardens gives us a big clue. Sorry if these examples hurt your eyes. They do mine. And I didn’t even show you the photos with irrigation tubing as the most prominent feature.

Mid-summer in the city’s gardens.

So I’m wondering if the horticulture crew’s preference for outdated plants and design styles is behind their refusal of volunteer help, donated plants and garden-club expertise. Surely they’ve heard criticism.   

I found some older photos of the garden from when its irrigation system was functioning and the crew planted annuals there. We’re told they intend to “increase horticultural activity” there, so we can expect to see the return of these pitiful annuals. We would have filled in the blank spaces with perennials, mostly divisions from on-site.

How to improve city plantings?

I’ve long hoped to see change come to our outdated, high-maintenance, wasteful public gardens. Does anyone have examples of civic gardens that would save the city money on plants, water and labor? I suspect that arguments over design or even environmental concerns might not carry the day, but cost savings might. Help! 

Does it make sense to keep buying annuals every year that need this amount of fussing over? And resources? I see this water truck and crew frequently, about a block from my house, keeping a few annuals alive.

Banished from the Garden I Cleared and Maybe Loved too Much originally appeared on GardenRant on August 2, 2026.

The post Banished from the Garden I Cleared and Maybe Loved too Much appeared first on GardenRant.

This spring I was needing plants. Never, I hear you cry! Well, huh, I did. And I looked online for what I needed and was horrified at the cost of them. And while I quite understand the challenges nurseries are up against, they were quite out of my reach.

Except – there were lots for sale at good (comparatively) prices bare rooted. Well, it felt like a no brainer – it was that or nothing. So I succumbed. And ordered some, somewhat tentatively. If giving my card details is a tentative thing.

When I started gardening, a long time ago, bare root plants were sent out wrapped in newspaper – remember that rather useful stuff? Fish and chips in Britain have never recovered since they stopped wrapping them in something which absorbed the steam. And (bare root plants) were an ordinary way of obtaining plants, mostly shrubs, trees and roses – and that is still often the case now, I understand. But that would be in the autumn. This was mid April. And I had not come across bare root perennials in spring before.

They looked rather hopeless when they arrived.

Like this!

 

Some came in a plastic bag with a generous sprinkling of dry compost. Which was a nice free gift, but I’m not sure what it offered the plants.

I potted my first few up, feeling very apologetic to them, and rather disbelieving as I bent the roots round to squish them into pots which were round rather than suitably long and thin. I put lids over them, feeling that keeping them warm and moist might help.

And I waited. On the first of May I had hope :

and

Then I kept getting emails telling me I could have more and more, at err.. sale prices. So I kept at it.

I even grew on some geraniums until they were big enough to plant out, though it has to be said that this is basically a slow growing method. Anyway, would you believe, these precious, sweated over darlings got instantly devoured by some foul creature, chomp chomp – and no, it was not slugs or snails. Vole?? Mice! (err, traps proved it)

Big Swearing Word!

One other plant, a thalictrum, got chomped at about a foot high. What on earth? Flying mice?

Back to the bare rooted. I’ve got used, now, to the rather weird beginnings. This is not how a normal seedling emerges, is it? (Long time since I sowed seeds.)

 

 

This one totally refused to fit in the pot.

 

I think I am winning. It works. It could be the future.

One sad point, though. I ordered Persicaria microcephala ‘ ‘Red Dragon’ and it eventually became this: (whatever this is)

 

I waited a long time, in order to be sure. The seller has acknowledged that it’s the wrong plant. But they have no replacements, so I get a refund. Buy cheap, get cheap refund…… Sigh….

However, other things came on well.

 

And now, we have a heatwave. For the third time. So all those plants are now confined to the nursery because I can’t plant them out. Do I go on potting up?? My greed has come back to bite me. What a chore.

A bit of a burden now? This is just a sample…..

 

It’s going to be a very planting autumn.

Bare Root Plants originally appeared on GardenRant on July 23, 2026.

The post Bare Root Plants appeared first on GardenRant.

Sometimes by the time midsummer arrives in my garden I can take a breath. Other times that breath is more of an exasperated sigh. It’s a rhythm that’s as regular as rain in my garden. Although, rain is far from regular in a Pacific Northwest summer which leaves me hours at the end of hose to critique the state of affairs in my garden.

Especially so this year.

Last spring,  Debra Prinzing and I co-hosted a tour/workshop in Amsterdam and Belgium. Deb is a dear forever friend and oh how we love a road trip adventure and this was a chance to take our typical MO to a delightful river boat cruising canals and waterways through the extraordinarily beautiful, flat (so flat!) landscape. Back here at home, most of spring was spent prepping for the trip followed by two weeks of travel and another month trying to catch up on what I didn’t get to before I left. Which is all to say, much of the garden never got dealt with: planting, pruning, soil improvement. *big exasperated sigh*

It’s not pretty. Pouting in this season of my discontent, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what went wrong. And then it hit me — my garden has grown beyond my reach. An untenable — and more importantly, un-tendable — situation. Having a garden that’s difficult to wrangle is a time-honored recipe for unleashing a feral garden.

At this point I should mention, those parts of the garden that tootle along independent of me are fine, maybe a little weedier and yes some plants need to be divided, but these are things only visible to a disgruntled gardener (me). Everyone else sees bobbing blooms on the angel’s fishing wand plants that have seeded themselves about; the oak leaf hydrangea is in full flower (discreetly obscuring the faded blooms from last season that never got removed); the PCH iris (that need to be divided) bloomed their fool heads off, and dozens of skinny stems of carefree Verbena bonariensis, my favorite self sower, punctuate the ornamental grasses.

What does it say about me when the garden does better without my input?

Last week, perched at the top of the back steps where all garden decisions and deeds are plotted, I think I came up with a strategy for restoring order. There will be ladders and saws, loppers and pruners. Let me explain.

I love the contrast of clipped garden forms alongside unfettered growth. Several boxwood orbs and a 4-foot cone indulge my love of snip, snip, snip when I get around to it but suffer a year of shagginess just fine. The “pleached” hedge of crabapples, not so much.

My semi-pleached crabapple hedge on a very brief moment in spring.

My semi-pleached crabapple hedge in winter is lovely – provided it get’s proper shaping.

One of my favorite parts of touring Amsterdam and Belgium in spring was seeing pollarded trees in spring nakedness with knobby knuckled limbs a result of years of strict management. Formally clipped trees and shrubs are a Dutch tradition, sometimes due to lack of space, sometimes strictly for the architectural structure.

I mean, come on! Look at that brilliant work in the garden of Martje van den Bosch

Visiting the garden of Martje van den Bosch in Demen and seeing a remarkable display of brilliantly curated plantings of tulips and early season perennials put me in my color-loving happy place, but the masterfully pruned shrubs and trees dividing the sixteen garden rooms were what really blew my mind. Look at how those scallops in the beech hedge cradle the hornbeam in the distance. Those trees on the right look like the bristly little Christmas trees I put out during the holidays. I mean — come on!

Wherever we went, tiny street side gardens with barely a meter of planting space made room for pruned plane trees, a pleached hedge or an espaliered vine.

Pollarded plane trees in Haarlem.

Pleaching on the streets of Haarlem (left) and in the remarkable Keukenhof Gardens.

This is what a pleached hedge is supposed to look like.

A far more realistic depiction of my semi-pleached crabapple hedge

This is what my pleached crabapple hedge looks like for most of the year. And I’m not thrilled with the flopping germander either.

So here’s my plan. In a month or so I will be cutting my unsuccessfully pleached crabapples back to a skeleton scaffold. Sure, I’ll miss the seasonal flowers and fruit for a year or two but I’m hoping this admittedly drastic approach will restore control and teach me something about maintaining a garden within my grasp.

I know some gardeners disparage this heavy-handed approach to growing woody plants in a confined space. But isn’t this what gardening is all about – the hand of the gardener in concert with a growing space and within the governing rules of nature?

I believe the relationship between those who tend and the environment under their care is paramount. I’ve always loved an ambitious (sometimes hare-brained) garden project and clearly have shown I’m willing to fail in the process.

Meanwhile, you should see my draft bulb order!!! 

Flower market in Haarlem. The sign for those gigantic sleeves of blue hyacinths said two bunches for five Euros.

My garden has grown beyond my reach — now what? originally appeared on GardenRant on July 20, 2026.

The post My garden has grown beyond my reach — now what? appeared first on GardenRant.

In Susan’s back yard, the comfrey is abuzz with bees.

My friend Kathy Jentz (writer/editor/podcaster) told me not to miss her podcast interview with landscape architect Thomas Rainer, the highly regarded landscape architect and author. I’ve listened and I was intrigued by his big-picture and forward-looking perspective. (And Kathy’s a very good interviewer.)

After her interview with Thomas, Kathy read an except from her book Groundcover Revolution. – the part about comfrey, one of my favorite groundcovers.  As a lawn-free gardener, I’ve learned to count on plants that DO THE JOB – cover the ground quickly and thickly enough to prevent new weeds, and require no inputs.

If only this groundcover were native to somewhere in North America, I think it would be wildly popular as a lawn replacement. But for anyone who IS open to a tough, near-evergreen, pollinator magnet that’s from Europe, I recommend they see what Kathy has to say about it, illustrated with photos from three of my gardens. Susan  

Plant Profile: Dwarf Comfrey, aka Iberian comfrey, Comphrey

Dwarf Comfrey (Symphytum ibericum) makes an impenetrable groundcover that is wonderful for swallowing leaves and blocking out weeds. It spreads by underground roots and forms mounds of dark-green leaves. The flowers are clusters of peachy-yellow bells on the end of tall, nodding stocks. 

It can grow from full sun to part shade, with reports that it even thrives in full shade. It is not picky about soil types and is drought-tolerant once established. It is in the Borage family and has many similarities to that perennial herb.

Comfrey is an efficient soil nutrient accumulator. After the first flush of flowers, chop the plants down and spread the pieces around for an excellent garden mulch. Comfrey “manure” is a rich source of calcium and manganese. Add it to your compost pile as well as the comfrey leaves act as a bio-activator. The plants will regrow quickly.

It can quickly cover an open area and does well on slopes and hillsides for erosion control.

In Susan’s front yard, blooming with azaleas.

It is easily propagated by root cuttings or division. It is difficult to remove all the roots when transplanting it and it will return, so plant it in a spot where you intend to keep it.

Dwarf Comfrey is a pollinator powerhouse plant. Adding it near your vegetable garden encourages bees to visit your nearby tomatoes and other plants to pollinate them as well. Beekeepers will especially want to cultivate this groundcover near their hives.

In Susan’s back garden.

It is a desirable groundcover for use under fruit trees and berry bushes. The comfrey’s root systems don’t compete with that of the trees and shrubs. A solid groundcover of Dwarf Comfrey eliminates the need to weed-whack and mow around the fruit-bearing plants, which protects them from possible mechanical injury.

Deer do not find it palatable and it is free of serious disease and pest issues.

In the entrance garden to a commercial building that Susan adopted, it filled in quickly and is admired by passers-by.

According to plant expert Barbara Melera, “Comfrey’s most-significant qualities are related to what the plant does for garden soil. The fat roots aerate heavy clay soils, breaking them up into much more-amenable loam.”

Kathy Jentz is editor of Washington Gardener Magazine, author of three books, and host of the award-winning podcast Garden DC. 

Kathy Jentz on Dwarf Comfrey, with photos from Susan’s gardens originally appeared on GardenRant on July 19, 2026.

The post Kathy Jentz on Dwarf Comfrey, with photos from Susan’s gardens appeared first on GardenRant.

I’m back in Maryland after a short trip to Los Angeles, where these plants and gardens got me gasping with envy, or dying to learn about, or both. All in the Encino area.

Lantana in a warm climate – a revelation!

I’m a recent fan of Lantana in pots, for their sheer beauty and how they attract all sorts of pollinators. But mine don’t get the chance to look like this because they’re killed by the first frost, usually around Thanksgiving. 

So THIS is how they look in the LA area, hardiness zones 10 to 11A. I wonder if they look this good in January. Damn I want that.

Eugenia hedges everywhere – because it’s such a performer!

With smallish lots and lots of pools, hedges are everywhere in this neighborhood and almost all of them are Eugenia. (And thanks to Santa Barbara landscape architect Billy Goodnick for identifying it for me, including its newest botanical name –  Syzigium paniculatum.)

I was floored by this plant’s performance as a privacy screen – with its full evergreen foliage down to the ground, and its fullness even when pruned to a narrow few inches, like the example on the left above.  Residents of townhouses like mine desperately need a plant like this (because we’re allowed only a tiny bit of privacy fencing). But new 1/4-acre developments are lacking privacy, too. On the many Reddit subs I follow, privacy is a huge topic.  

Anyway, I found out why people LOVE this plant for hedges, including that it grows up to 4 feet a year, for crissakes.

The Eugenia Shrub, Eugenia Uniflora, also known as Surinam Cherry, can serve as a quick and easy privacy hedge solution. can grow in excess of 25 feet (8 m.) tall. In U.S. hardiness zones 10 and 11 the shrub averages 8 to 20 feet After being established for a year or two, they will likely produce a crop of Surinam cherries. hardiness zone 10A through 11. It’s native to South America. Source. 

They’re popular in Florida, too. “Eugenia is one of South Florida’s finest hedge or privacy plants – great-looking, fast-growing, dense, and hardy.”

Licorice Plant hedges are either very cool or kinda weird

I had another wtf moment when I walked by this yard with maybe the coolest short hedge I’ve ever seen. It’s Licorice Plant. 

Helichrysum petiolare, commonly known as Licorice Plant, is a versatile and distinctive, heat-tolerant evergreen perennial native to South Africa, This fast-growing, evergreen subshrub is widely cultivated for its fuzzy, silver-green foliage and trailing habit.

I would totally grow this plant if I lived there.

My favorite front-yard gardens

Landscape fabric – the most-regretted garden mistake ever.  

Hate for landscape fabric/weed cloth is another hugely popular topic on Reddit. Oh, the stories people tell!

Cool plants and gardens spotted in a Los Angeles neighborhood originally appeared on GardenRant on July 12, 2026.

The post Cool plants and gardens spotted in a Los Angeles neighborhood appeared first on GardenRant.

If you’ve ever thought of edging a flower bed with proper professional stuff, you may have been astonished to find that the makers of garden edging assume you live in a flat garden. With no lumps or bumps. And nice even curves. Weird.

Well, Veddw’s not like that and we still have edging issues. But this is about a sorted fencing issue in this lumpy landscape which may be useful to some other lumpy people. My apologies if you are such a keen Veddw follower that this is old hat and boring.

This was the fence at its best and when it featured on the front of Charles’s book.

 

And on the book:

Though I notice that even there it has a wonky strut.

The problem that this fence addresses is:

a. It sits on a boundary and so has to be in precisely that spot.

b. The ground it sits on is full of boulders and odd rocks. So it’s not flat. It’s impossible to put in supporting posts because you can’t bash anything into the ground.

c. It is hiding an ugly chain link boundary fence.

d. The ground slopes, so you can’t get a nice level top.

e. The field behind is a couple of feet lower and belongs to someone else.

Hence the roofing laths or roofing battens. They are mounted on long planks and it is the planks which are supported at either end. The battens are all different lengths so that the lack of flat is no longer obvious. (I’m clever, don’t you think??) And they are pressure treated against rot. Which means they last a whole week! (If you’re lucky. Who’d use wood?)

Sounds simple. It was a nightmare to make and a nightmare to repair. We have done both, working together. The battens when mounted on a plank, with great difficulty, are very heavy. And then have to be put in place, and kept in place while secured. It was not fun.

 

By now (2026) the fence was looking like the above. Things were growing up it and they were helping to disguise the fact that it was rotting. Not all of it but a sad lot of it. We thought of letting the ivy totally cover it. We have such an ivy fence elsewhere. But it would be a loss. I love this fence.

Then, what do you know, that really useful bloke of mine started work on it. This was in a heatwave!!!!! (He was quite a find, that man, don’t you think? Well spotted, me)

 

 

So now it is mended and back to its former glory. Phew. And maybe this thing is a good idea for someone out there, needing a fence. I do hope so. Here it is:

Do ignore the grotty damaged foliage at the bottom. Can’t make an omelette…..

and:

 

 

 

Is it the view beyond that makes it special?

A Fence where no Fence could be. originally appeared on GardenRant on July 9, 2026.

The post A Fence where no Fence could be. appeared first on GardenRant.

My photos from (L) somewhere near Toronto and (R), in beautiful West Seattle, GardenRanter Lorene Edwards Forkner’s very own garden.

If you’re a member of Wild Ones, you may have noticed my short article in the latest issue. Wild Ones is a national nonprofit with 99 chapters and what they call “seedlings” in 37 states; its mission is promoting native landscapes. (Members can read the whole issue here.)

Wild Ones was interested in my collection of Lawnless Front Yards on Flickr, which I hoped would help people who wanted more from their yards than just turfgrass. Front yards are the trickiest places to go lawnless (HOAs, local ordinances, neighbor relations) and people need to see alternatives that will work even there, and can be used in back yards, too.   

L: my photo in Takoma Park, Maryland. R: somewhere in Colorado, garden and photo by breecorn on Reddit, with permission

But replacing lawns with gardens like these means becoming actual gardeners, which means tons of learning, hard physical work (often more than mowing), making mistakes, etc. And most of these gardens will require more work than the lawn they replaced. This is an important warning because sadly, most of the people asking me about lawn replacement are looking for NO-maintenance, which we know isn’t a real thing. They should stick with their barely-good-enough, turf+weed combo that they mow a few times a season. Or pay the kid next door to mow. 

Okay, I’m ranting now but some people are just happier living in an apartment, with not a square foot of land to take care of.  And I mean no judgment here; for me it’s cooking – no interest at all! But when it comes to yard size, it can be hard to find an alternative, thanks to zoning that typically prevents denser housing outside the cities. 

My photo of friends’ garden in Historic Greenbelt, Maryland.

Replacing whole lawns is a great opportunity to spend time on your land NOT walking behind a mower but enjoying an outdoor living space with lots of different plants, plus seating and maybe a firepit. I love to see gardens like that, especially in the front!

And surely the plants used, from groundcovers to trees, will provide more ecological services than turfgrass.

But clearly what new eco-gardeners need help with design. And that help needs to come from the gardening world because it’s hard to find in the “go native” and anti-lawn messaging I’ve seen.

So I’m happy to hear from Redditors and others that the 287 images on the site so far are helpful. My article about reactions to it will appear in the next winter issue of Wild Ones.  

How it started for me

Wild Ones also invited me to do a short piece explaining my connection to the topic of lawn replacement, which just appeared and is copied below. There wasn’t room for photos of the garden that I wrote about, but thankfully there’s plenty of room here.

My former back yard, where I replaced lawn with sedum and clover. Which I don’t recommend. Takoma Park, Md.

Close-up of white clover dominating the shorter Sedum sarmentosum.

One of the minor edits has me wondering how to handle plants with no commonly used common name – like “stringy stonecrop” for Sedum sarmentosum. Actually, what stumps me most often is how to capitalize common names, which I’m sure I do incorrectly and make the better horticulturally educated among you, including my GardenRant partners, cringe.

I heard right away from a new native-plant gardener near me suggesting we get together, so that’s fun.

As you can see, this issue covers fire, and there’s one more article about lawns and homeowner associations.

Summer 2026 issue of Wild Ones Magazine

My adventures in lawn-killing in Wild Ones Magazine originally appeared on GardenRant on July 5, 2026.

The post My adventures in lawn-killing in Wild Ones Magazine appeared first on GardenRant.

I pulled over last month while driving down Logan Street in Louisville’s Shelby Park neighborhood. I spotted a small memorial encircled by scuffed-up salvaged bricks under a young tree decorated with a red bow and bouquets. The recent planting showed tell-tale signs of TreesLouisville, a local non-profit.

A friendly man told me his friend O.B. had hung out on the adjacent steep steps. One day O.B. lost his balance, hit his head on the hard sidewalk, and died.

Minutes later a woman walked by, smiled, and said she was O.B.’s cousin. I told her I was sorry.

I could identify the flowers both real and fake, but I didn’t recognize the tree. I was curious.

Maurice Oberton “O.B.” Coward 61, passed away on April 30, 2026. His brother Michael predeceased him. O.B. is survived by his brothers Terry, Ricky, and Toddie.

O.B. Coward’s brother, Toddie, with Euonymus grandiflorus ‘Ebony Green’

German Catholic immigrants living around Shelby Street were targets of Louisville’s Bloody Monday immigration riot of 1855. Sentiments gradually changed. Ten years later, Louisville elected a German mayor. Shelby Park was designed by the Olmsted Firm in 1907 with the large German community in mind. Recreation was a focus. Park features included athletic amenities for baseball, track, croquet, and gymnasiums for men and women. A Carnegie Library opened on the park’s edge in 1911.

A local renaissance

Following white flight to the suburbs in the 1970s, Shelby Park withstood a long period of declining use, neglected maintenance and physical decay that persisted until the 1990s. Jefferson County Public Schools attempted to take over Shelby Park in 1999, but neighbors, local officials, and the Olmsted Parks Conservancy saved the 17-acre park. I asked a food vendor at the nearby Logan Street Market about his current assessment. He grinned and said, “The neighborhood and park are public again.”

Shelby Street, beginning at the corner of East Kentucky, and heading south, is a pleasant block of long, colorful shotgun houses squeezed together on narrow lot lines. Many homes have porches, a neighborly architectural feature of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. A few curbsides are planted with coreopsis, gaillardia, evening primrose, dappled by dandelion and white-flowering hedge parsley interlopers.

A well-fed cat roamed Shelby Street in and out of the shade of zelkovas, redbuds, crabapples, a tulip poplar, and newer plantings from TreesLouisville.

Around the block at the corner of St. Catherine and Logan Street were  TreesLouisville plantings under power lines next to Idlewild Butterfly Farm. Smaller-growing trees: Cornus kousa ‘Greensleeves, Syringa pekinensis ‘Great Wall’, Cornus mas ‘Saffron Sentinel.’ It was hard to miss Idlewild’s magnificent elderberry growing through a chain-link fence. Their back garden was full of pollinator friendly borage, zinnias, butterfly weed— even stinging nettles.  (I touched a leaf for foolproof identification. I knew better. It stung.)

Elderberry at Idlewild Butterfly Farm

If it’s an unusual tree, Mike Hayman is the usual suspect

The retired Courier-Journal photojournalist got the tree bug in middle age and got it bad. I emailed Mike and asked him about the mystery tree—and memorial. He is now the senior projects director of TreesLouisville. Their headquarters are a few blocks away.

Mike went by to look at the mystery tree and met Toddie Coward, O.B. Coward’s youngest brother. Toddie created most of the memorial. “It’s good for TreesLouisville to see the trees they planted around Shelby Park and nearby Smoketown, become a part of the community,” Mike said.

Matt Thomas of TreesLouisville knew O.B. and would often see him on the street close to the TreesLouisville office. Morgan Grubbs wrote a remembrance in the June newsletter— “O.B. was a regular walk-by friend of our staff…Mike Hayman’s photo shows O.B.’s brother Toddie sitting next to the memorial with gifts from his community—a true sign that trees offer us so much in terms of peace, gathering, remembrance, and strength.”

Toddie Coward often sits in a folding chair, on the Shelby Street sidewalk in the shade, fifty feet from his brother’s memorial tree. He waves regularly to friends who drive by. His brothers live nearby, and so do cousins—“So many I can’t count them all.”

Mike Hayman and Cindi Sullivan, TreesLouisville’s charismatic and indefatigable executive director, often say, “It’s not just about the trees, it’s also about the people and improving the life and health of this community.” They give thanks to Henry Heuser their friend and TreesLouisville founder. Heuser is a businessman, civic legend, longtime tree lover and people connector. “Henry and Cindi know everyone,”  Hayman said. That makes a difference.

Toddie Coward sits by a memorial he made for his brother Maurice. Mike Hayman photo.

It was no surprise: TreesLouisville planted the mystery tree

Hayman identified O.B.’s precocious eight-footer as Euonymus grandiflorus ‘Ebony Green’, a selection of a small, semi-evergreen, temperate species from the woodlands of southeast Asia. He sourced the tree from rabid tree collectors at Sunshine Nursery in Clinton, OK. “I’ve known Steve Bieberbach for 30 years. He was my source for southwestern trees. Now I am working with his grandson Kadin.” Hayman said.

Dark green leaves and tiny pale-yellow to beige blooms of the grand euonymus were evident. But I need to wait for the red to fall color. The tree will grow to approximately 20’.

Hayman thinks it is prudent to experiment with successful landscape trees from other parts of the country—like Oklahoma—that are hotter and drier. He’s also experimenting with lacey oak (Quercus laceyi) from Texas that appears happy so far. “We need to adapt to warming temperatures in the next hundred years,” Hayman said.

The average life expectancy for a tree planted in an ordinary tree well is a scant 7-10 years. Upfront amendments can increase the life expectancy of a tree well planting in tough spots, many under power lines, to 50 years. A  typical tree well is 5’ x 5.’ Trees Louisville enlists a contractor to enlarge tree wells to 5’ x 8’ and 2’ deep. Dense grade aggregate and compacted soil are dug out, and the hole is filled with a beneficial garden soil mix.

There are many beautiful leafy neighborhoods in Louisville

On the flip side are scattered barren, treeless heat islands centered principally around downtown. Dr. Brian Stone of Georgia Tech was in Louisville last week. He updated his 2016 report that had singled Louisville out for having the hottest urban heat index in the country. This is the temperature differential between Louisville’s urban core and outlying rural areas. Louisville’s downtown has 4%-5% tree coverage. This compares unfavorably to New York’s 21% and Chicago’s 17%. New York has 50 miles of lineal trees. Dr. Jones praised West Main Street’s historic cast iron architecture. He admitted downtown Atlanta had nothing comparable, but he warned, “If you’re going to be economically viable you need more trees downtown.”

Tree selection makes a difference

A few trees won’t make it three years. The majority can make it longer with periodic watering the first two years and structural pruning for the first ten years. Larger canopy trees for lawns and open spaces? Hayman suggest native oaks: bur, shingle, chinkapin, and swamp white oaks. Also, black gum cultivars: ‘Firemaster’, ‘Red Rage’ and ‘Wildfire.’ Plus, Gingko (males) and Dawn redwood cultivars: ‘Amber Glow’ and ‘Jade Prince.’ These can all survive for 100 years or more.

I spent my 75th birthday in late May at a fundraiser dinner for the West End School at Perso’s restaurant, a couple of blocks away from O.B’s tree. The school supporters sang Happy Birthday. I was touched.

My birthday wish?

I hope TreesLouisville and O.B.’s tree have many more tree rings to add.

* * *

Please read James Bruggers’ Inside Climate News article about Trees Louisville: Helping trees—and Louisville— outrace climate change.  The dedicated and award-winning reporter died this week. Connor Griffin, of Louisville’s Courier-Journal, called Bruggers a “giant of environmental journalism.”

Gratitude for TreesLouisville and O.B. Coward’s memorial tree originally appeared on GardenRant on June 19, 2026.

The post Gratitude for TreesLouisville and O.B. Coward’s memorial tree appeared first on GardenRant.

Intro to r/BoomersBeingFoolish subreddit.

Boomer-Bashing is IN!

As a Baby Boomer, I don’t go looking for examples of the Boomer-bashing that seems ubiquitous these days, sadly.  I see it rarely on my Facebook or Threads feeds but to my dismay, can’t avoid it on the plant-related Reddit subs I follow.

(I landed on the subreddit /BoomersBeingFools seen above through search and now worry that the algo will populate my feed with that crap.) 

In the realm of gardening I found this bit of agism at /gardenwild: “Hey everyone@ I’ve got a stereotypical boomer neighbor who has the classic pristinely manicured lawn, some ornamental plants for decoration, etc./ I see him more often lately l0oking at our yard disapprovingly.”

And at /fucklawns I found “I hate the boomer mindset so fucking much.  My grandpa just killed a beautiful tree because it ‘makes a mess.’ (It didn’t)”

Another posted that “My neighbor (boomer)” did such-and-such bad things. How gratuitous is that parenthetical “boomer”?!

Responding to agism

My first attempt at responding actually met with some success – it made me feel better. I wrote “It really saddens me to see generalizations like yours about people my age. Remember, we were also big activists.  Some of us. But I’ll stop because defending my generation from insults isn’t good for my mental health. I’m going back to the garden.” To which the Boomer-basher’s reply included “I’m sorry that I used the term boomer implying every boomer.  It was a certain type who specifically hired a landscaper and got angry if it wasn’t perfect.”

(Dare I say if you lumped all members of any other demographic group with the behavior of its worst examples, you might be called racist.  In this case, “agist” works.

To another Boomer-basher I responded by bragging about the activism in the ’60s and ending with “How is it okay for seemingly enlightened people to be so agist?” That prompted no reply from the offender but I appreciated this from a kindred spirit: “TY for saying this. Am 77yo F.”

Here’s one more response I love, a correction to sweeping generalizations about generations: “I live in a neighborhood with a mix of retired people and people in their 30s and 40s, about half and half. All the retired people have taken out the grass; it’s only the younger people with lawns. I assume that’s because they are too busy with their jobs and lives to think very much about grass, or they have kids or dogs that they maintain it for.”

Who *should* we blame for the conventional, conformist American landscape?

If we were to blame any one generation of Americans, maybe it should be my parents’ generation – the so-called Greatest Generation. That thought sent me looking for photos of gardens created by my mother, an avid gardener born in 1917 and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. 

This was where I grew up in Bon Air, Virginia, seen in the top photo on a recent visit, and below that, backyard fun in the ’50s. (We took photos of people, not plants.) We never took photos of the large veg garden or the long borders of roses and who-knows-what, but yes, the convention of front lawns and foundation shrubs was on display in the front.

No matter what plants my mother grew there, this yard was a wonderful yard to grow up in. It even had unlandscaped areas we could build forts in, bury treasures in, be a kid in.  

Our second home in 1966 (L) and 1970 (R).

But it wasn’t to last. When I was 15, at my mother’s urging, we moved to an upscale neighborhood in Richmond, where both front and back yards were formal and there was no space for growing food. Or for a cheap little swimming pool, like the one we left behind (seen at the end of this post). Or enough flat lawn for badminton, our favorite family sport, along with games in the pool. 

(Off-topic but funny to me is how much my style changed from high school to college – from frumpy and slouched over to hippie chick! And I made that pink mini-dress myself.)

Moving to a new, no-fun yard wasn’t the worst, though – I’d been enrolled in a very snotty high school where I was miserable, a sentiment I may have been expressing in this photo of me in the back garden.

On the right is the only photo I have of my mother gardening; she doesn’t look very happy, either. 

You know what the new garden WAS good for? My sister’s 1971 wedding reception, and formal photos like this one. That’s me, fourth from the left.

So who/what to REALLY blame?

For a historical perspective, and recognizing that lawns are the dominant feature of the conventional American garden, I turned to Ted Steinberg’s 2006 book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn. He outlines the real causes and inspirations for the type of American landscape that’s now so reviled.

In 1875, Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, a planned community outside Chicago that imposed 30-foot setbacks from the road – and established large open front lawns as the new ideal. Michael Pollan (who calls Olmsted the “Father of the American Lawn”) described it in his 1989 article “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns”:  “Each owner would maintain one or two trees and a lawn that would flow seamlessly into his neighbors’, creating the impression that all lived together in a single park.”

In 1870 Frank J. Scott published “The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds,” which Michael Pollan calls “a book that probably did more than any other to determine the look of the suburban landscape in America.”

Developers! Notably Joseph Levitt, creator of Levittown and other planned communities. “Only with the housing boom following the second world war did the idea of perfect turf become a national preoccupation“ (Levittown was built between 1947 and ’51.) “Levitt and sons invented a mass-produced landscape to go along with its ready-made housing. Levitt himself was an avid gardener who used to personally inspect the state of Levittown lawns and gardens…A covenant to the deeds of Levittown required that grass must be cut once a week between April and November. Levitt wrote that ‘a fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitant as good neighbors, as desirable citizens.” He recommended that lawns be fertilized five or six times a year. Source.

The Scott Company, which launched a lawn care magazine in 1928, pushing its seven-step lawn care program using its many products.

Gas-powered lawn mowers entered the U.S. market (from the U.K.) in 1919.

So it was in the post-WWII era that lawns and foundation plantings – all open to the road, no fences or hedges –  became the ideal in the U.S.

Should Boomers have rebelled against conventional yards?

I hope I’ve convinced you that Boomers did NOT create the type of garden that’s so reviled in today’s eco-gardening messaging. And before you criticize Boomers for not challanging the gardening style or practices now known to be harmful, remember we were busy taking on the Vietnam War, racism and sexism.

Also, to judge us by what was known at the time, environmental awareness was very new, starting with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which focused on the use of pesticides. It was decades more before concepts like lawn replacement and gardening for wildlife entered the conversation.

In this 1942 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, homeowners were urged to use some of their lawn space for growing food.

Don’t blame Baby Boomers for the conventional American garden style you hate originally appeared on GardenRant on June 14, 2026.

The post Don’t blame Baby Boomers for the conventional American garden style you hate appeared first on GardenRant.

An apology:

I went on a proper holiday (a week!) for the first time in many years, and it’s left me short of time to write a post for you. But on that holiday we did visit one of the Royal Horticultural Gardens and I can tell you about that. Sorry for American readers that it’s in England. 

I need to start by exploring just what a garden like Rosemoor means to me. I’ve spent a long time trying to make sense of my responses to gardens like this, which do, after all, seem to be the very peak of model star gardens to most of the gardening public. But they do tend to leave me a little cold, even in a heatwave. And there was a heatwave.

Here’s a clue, from The History of RHS Garden Rosemoor:

“Filled with an astounding collection of plants including rhododendrons, camellias, roses, and champion trees, a series of garden areas leads visitors from one joyous area to the next.”

This garden is unashamedly a plant collection. And that becomes clear as you arrive.

Labels

 

Though visitors should be warned that labelling is always totally problematic in a garden and you need to check carefully before purchasing something you fell in love with. I found many misleading labels due to the season or perhaps sudden deaths. Hopefully AI will kill these eyesores one day, but I don’t expect it soon.

No, it’s not.

 

Sometimes it’s just a bit funny:

It says Cotoneaster procumbens ‘Queen of Carpets’. One day, maybe….

 

It’s intended to be educational:

 

And although it was once a person’s (a plant collector..) own garden, it has been expanded far beyond that original site. (See history) Rather like that other famous garden, Wildside, it has been dramatically shaped with earth moving machines:

“More than 13,000 tonnes of soil were removed from the new entrance area and car park, and redistributed in the Formal Garden area to level off the site.”

So it cannot be thought of as a response to its site or to a sense of place. I don’t think it aims to be beautiful or exciting. Which is what I look for in a garden. Along with seats.

But I believe it is offering what the majority of garden visitors expect and enjoy, and that probably applies to readers of this post too? 

Here’s the Plan:

 

It’s big. Happily it does have lots of seats. And two cafes. Good cream teas.

We started, after odd pauses and sits =

That’s not us. We were on the seat opposite admiring the somethings.

 

at the Queen Mother’s Rose Garden, with lots of labelled roses – good if you’re wanting to see roses in the flesh. I think there’s another rose garden too, for shrub roses – this may be that one.

 

Then there are Model Gardens, which I confess we didn’t seem able to make much sense of.

Let’s consider a garden we did like. Charles especially:

 

Charles enjoyed the use of water and the plant selection. The paths are wheelchair wide, but none the worse for it.

There he is.

 

 

 

 

Outside that garden there’s lots of this kind of thing:

 

And a sad child?

 

And bare soil. I hate bare soil.

 

There’s a Hot Garden looking not so hot. I guess if you make gardens with bulldozers you then have to invent notions about what you install on the site. And it’s good if everyone’s heard of ‘Hot Gardens,’ ‘Cottage Gardens’ and the like.

Hot Garden, playing it cool…

 

I think this is from the inevitable Cottage Garden:

 

Noooo….. horrible!

 

There’s a meadow, looking very tidy, flat and new and not a bit like the older version at Veddw: (reassuring if you want to make a new one yourself. Maybe it takes a few lifetimes to look really rough) Rosemoor has some great orchids.

 

Orchids and much yellow rattle

 

Labelling at its worst:

 

Can’t we perhaps be happy with one good plant in a pot?

 

OK – what about the things we liked??!! (About time) I must have liked some things because Charles caught me smiling:

 

So, pleasures: here, a delight by the cafe:

Three beautiful ferns, grouped together. Lovely. Dryopteris erythorosa Brilliance, I think. Worth eating a cream tea in order to enjoy that sight.

 

Some pillars. I think I like them. Or are they just a bit pointless?

 

But the place we both loved was the Rock Gully, by the Underpass:

 

 

 

 

Cool, soothing, and beautifully planted.

 

And nearby a tremendous plant:

 

 

I think we enjoyed our visit. If you want to discover labelled plants you will be happier here than in a nursery, as you can see them planted in ideal conditions and often in full growth rather than in pots. There are seats and cream teas: what’s not to love?

A Visit to Rosemoor: an RHS garden in Devon, England originally appeared on GardenRant on June 11, 2026.

The post A Visit to Rosemoor: an RHS garden in Devon, England appeared first on GardenRant.

When I moved to this yard 14 years ago I replaced the back lawn with mixed borders of trees, shrubs and perennials, deeper-than-usual borders like this one (coz, no more lawn).  But what I don’t remember seeing mentioned in the ubiquitous instructions in how to replace lawns with something – anything – is the need to provide access to the plants in those deep borders.

Now I’m just a gardener, but in my garden the key to success (defined as “I love it!”) is this narrow woodchip+creeping Jenny path that lets me access my oakleaf hydrangeas (to stake up low-lying limbs), remove roaming black-eyed susans, see and get to weeds, and most crucially, tie up the crossvine and coral honeysuckle I’m training on trellises, for beauty and screening/privacy. 

To keep the path passable I remove more susans as needed, and tie up the Joe Pye Weed to the fence so it doesn’t flop over onto the path.  Tying up (like limbing up shrubs) may sound like too much work but they’re one-and-done tasks that make tending my garden so much easier. 

Sign of a personality flaw?

I realize this may look too neat for your taste. You might choose to let it all grow together into a much wilder look. To which I say “You be you!”

But it’s not okay, in my book, to sneer at people who like this more controlled design and call them (us) tight-assed and anal-retentive. I create access in my garden beds not because of some personality disorder but because I’m a gardener and know what it takes to keep this plant collection healthy and beautiful.

I speak up because increasingly, even brand new gardeners are being instructed in gardening by nongardeners, often ecologists and entomologists. The results can sure be disappointing to newbieds hoping for an eco-friendly garden that’s also manageable, and pretty.

Here’s a large rain garden in my neighborhood, seen three years ago when it hadn’t seen any care in a long time. Actually it looked fine to me but people complained that it looked too messy. 

So all the perennials were removed, and new ones planted sparsely. I lamented at the apparent lack of design, but I understood the crew responsible for the garden wanted access, and they got it.

Here it was late last summer, showing how the crew is trying to avoid another dense wall of vegetation.

Next, an example of an experienced gardener creating access in her front border. Along the front wall is a 4-foot-wide mulched work area that’s extremely functional without being noticeable from the front.

Even “matrix” gardens need access

The National Arboretum’s Friendship Garden in late May 2026

I recently revisited the National Arboretum’s Friendship Garden designed by Claudia West. (I posted photos of this garden throughout the year in this Rant post.)  She and Thomas Rainer first exposed me to the notion of matrix gardening in their book “Planting in a Post-Wild World.” 

Matrix design is a way of combining plants that’s honestly over my head but I understand that all soil is supposed to be covered with plants, with no visible (or functional) mulch.

Despite all the books, webinars and social media buzz about matrix design, I’m sticking with massing (as I wrote in this post) and this post offers another reason for rejecting the hype – gotta have access because no matter the style, gardeners have to get in there and do stuff!

Gardeners like Christopher, the National Arboretum horticulturist who was tending the Friendship Garden when I visited last week. He told me he’d soon be weeding the paths acso they don’t disappear.

Gardener access in garden borders – a design feature that’s forgotten or just out of fashion? originally appeared on GardenRant on June 7, 2026.

The post Gardener access in garden borders – a design feature that’s forgotten or just out of fashion? appeared first on GardenRant.

Update on cues to care: I wrote this article for the members of my townhouse co-op as we face our next spring yard inspection. Here cues to care are prioritized, because some make a huge difference and others, not so much. All the yards shown here are small.

This post is for anyone considering reducing or removing their lawn, but I’ll speak directly to members of the Greenbelt Homes co-op (GHI).

So you’re facing the yearly yard inspection soon and you may be reminded of how much you dislike all the mowing required to keep your lawn short enough. Or maybe your lawn is full of bare spots, for a variety of reasons, that you’ll need to repair. If so, and especially if your yard is small, you might consider getting rid of your lawn altogether! Here are some ways to do that AND still pass a yard inspection – by creating a yard that still looks cared for.

The question of how to achieve this is very timely, and not just for co-op members. Laws and rules governing residential yards are increasingly in the news, including when the owner of the Long Island, NY yard seen above was threatened with a $2,000 fine. (Here’s the story in the New York Post.) Many were surprised that even prominent anti-lawn, pro-native plant advocate Benjamin Vogt criticized the homeowner for having such a messy yard, and urged her to incorporate cues to care in the yard.

What ARE “Cues to Care”?

What about attracting pollinators?

Yes, it’s possible to attract lots of pollinators and still have a yard that looks cared-for and worthy of passing inspection – by combining cues to care with plants that support pollinators. (Maryland Extension has good suggestions.) And here’s a video of “pollinator action” in my tiny front garden (also seen lower left in the collage above).

Cues to care in order of effectiveness, for upcoming yard inspection originally appeared on GardenRant on May 31, 2026.

The post Cues to care in order of effectiveness, for upcoming yard inspection appeared first on GardenRant.

The Commonwealth of Kentucky has a long-distinguished history of seed selection and preservation. Before Bill Best got serious with heirloom green bean seeds, there were Native Americans who put Kentucky on the world map before there were maps: four thousand years ago.

Kentucky seldom gets credit for being a world center of plant domestication, but Kentucky is right up there with Mesoamerica for corn and Africa for barley and oats.

Native Americans selected lamb’s quarters (Chenopodium sp.) and gourds for their bigger seeds and thinner seed coats as well as for their easier germination. They stored their seeds in the dry rock overhangs around the Red River Gorge in Eastern Kentucky. Gourd seeds didn’t win the race to the top of the food chart, but archaeological evidence suggests early breeders and seed collectors knew what they were doing.

Lamb’s quarters, Chenopodium album. Leaves are delicious.

There have also been Kentucky carbon-dated beans at least 1,000 years old. These could be “cut-shorts” that are still popular heirloom beans in the Southern Appalachians. They are called cut-shorts because the seeds completely fill the pods, which are squared off at the ends.

The “three sisters”—beans, corn and squash—have been staples in Southern Appalachian gardens for as long as gardens have been planted. Beans fixed nitrogen for corn that, in turn, provided support for the climbing beans.  The ground-covering squash smothered many of the weed seedlings.

Bill Best realized that it was time to look back to a period when heirloom strains of beans were shared in a community simply because they tasted good. 

Best has spent a long time looking to the past to save the future. He is a Berea College professor emeritus and co-founded the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center there.

The Best Quest

His goal was to search for the most flavorful homegrown regional vegetables. As a child growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Haywood County, North Carolina, he had savored the taste of heirloom green beans and tomatoes.

Hindman Settlement School photo.

The more popular green bean seed strains lacked the taste that he remembered from his youth. Newer hybrids were bred for mechanical harvesting. “I couldn’t believe how bad the Blue Lake bean was.”

“The high price of cheap food kicked flavor to the curb,” Bill Best says.

Best started the non-profit Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center in the 1990s to prove that “products this region can produce can compete with large-scale farms based on quality… We want to use our skills and information base (developed over many decades) to bring to the forefront the importance of quality heirloom fruits and vegetables. It is our hope that this Center will go far toward making mountain agriculture sustainable.”

For years he has shared his seeds around the world. 

Bill Best holding Leather Britches heirloom beans. Dobree Adams photo.

Willard Wynn, a yellow bi-color in Bill Best’s hand. Barbara Best Toti said, “Sold out for the season. Usually have a waiting list!”

Bill Best is disturbed over the monopolization of modern agricultural seed. He’s doing his best to increase options, not minimize them. He has collected over 1500 different bean seed strains to preserve for future generations and his family’s non-profit lists about 200 heirloom beans in inventory now. 

Cornfield, Cut-Shorts, Greasy Beans, Fall Beans, Wax Beans and Butter beans

Kentucky Heirloom Seeds—Growing, Eating, Saving, written by Best with Dobree Adams, and published in 2017 by the University Press of Kentucky, is storytelling at its best. It offers good advice, also, plus an extensive reading list for further thought. Saving seeds for next year has been a traditional practice for thousands of years. And it’s not that difficult. Bill Best appreciates the gardeners and farmers who’ve learned the value of good seeds and flavorful vegetables. Available from the Center’s website, 

Dobree Adams, a mutual friend of ours, said, “Bill is a genuine heirloom himself: growing, eating, and saving heirloom vegetables, especially beans and tomatoes. Years ago, he was a co-founder of the hugely successful Lexington Farmers Market and started or inspired many seed swaps as well as gardeners and farmers.”

I called Bill a few weeks ago and asked how he was doing. “Okay, but still here,” he said.  Then he began talking with the exuberance he’d shared in our last conversation in 2016. Bill is 90 now.  

Bean Stories are Fascinating and Funny

The turkey craw heirloom bean seed, as legend has it, was found in the craw of a turkey. And seeds of the Mortgage Lifter tomato helped pay off a mortgage.

Bill Best appreciates the cultural significance of Jack and the Beanstalk, the English folk tale, still popular in the Southern Appalachians.

A modern version, Jack and the Wonder Beans, was beautifully written, in an Eastern Kentucky vernacular, by James Still in 1977. Jack makes a deal with a gypsy and receives three beans. “Not common beans. Not regular beans.” The gypsy calls them “Wonder beans.” She gives Jack simple instructions: “Sow them and they will feed your life tee-total.”

Future Farmers of America of Gates County High School in Gatesville, North Carolina. Population 320.

Bill Best has turned over the reins of the non-profit Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center to his sons and daughter. Michael Best is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. Michael finds time to return to the family home in Berea to plant seeds, trellis and harvest crops. Other bean and tomato strains are grown in North Carolina and Tennessee. Barbara Best Toti lives in Gatesville, North Carolina and is responsible for order fulfillment with help from a couple of FFA students who sort and shell beans and help with packaging. Brother David keeps the website churning. Barbara said, He’s behind the scenes and I am in front of the scene.”

Get a flavor of Bill Best and his family’s legacy from this short YouTube video.

Bill Best Knows Best About The Wonders of Beans originally appeared on GardenRant on May 29, 2026.

The post Bill Best Knows Best About The Wonders of Beans appeared first on GardenRant.

A – I had a big bunch of needy, gorgeous annuals and perennials sitting in plastic nursery pots in the back yard waiting further instructions. They were to be the  finishing touches of our brand-new garden. After six frantic weeks of planting, having those plants in the ground would push us over the edge to a damn near finished garden. At least for late May. Damn near, anyway.

B – It was raining, steady and sullen. The forecast – I am not making this up – was for 10 straight days of rainy weather in our Louisville-Southern Indiana area. Ten. Straight. Days. Perhaps the most rain since Noah pulled his Ark out of drydock. Ten days.

Ready-to-plant

I was lying in bed, warm and dry,  looking out the window, and pondering the possibilities. I could feel my annuals and perennials looking back, well-watered, but neglected, wanting to be deeply planted, well rooted.

Guilt is a terrible thing to waste

At about 8:23 a.m. I slipped on old shoes, rain pants, sweatshirt, raincoat, old hat, clean gloves and headed out to greet  the rainy morning.

Turned out the rain was gentle, soothing, quite welcoming. Earlier frantic rains that week had toppled neighborhood trees, flooded ditches and had all of us thanking God for our working sump pumps. I gathered my digging utensils, hand-tools and thin-bladed shovel with sharp -toothed edges, the most valuable garden tool in planting history.

Our new plants were happy to see me, a mix of old fashioned and new including marigolds, begonias, geraniums, angelonia, acanthus, rudbeckia, Gerber daisy, helianthus, heliotrope,  and , yes, Bidens – not looking a bit sleepy. At this point in my gardening life, I just want stuff that works.

Filthy wet gloves and hat

As I started planting, knees squashed in wet dirt, rain dripping off my hat, I went from being a little concerned about the weather to being very happy. The work was soft-dirt easy, I was alone in it, the rain very friendly. We quickly bonded in mud.

Then I got to thinking there surely  must be a poem or song written about planting flowers in a soft rain, being at one with the landscape, wet words, dancing flutes and piccolos. With no thoughts of forthcoming dirty laundry. So inspired, I went to work on an earthy poem/song. Please feel free to dance. Nobody’s looking.

Planting flowers in the rain

It’s so easy on the brain

Digging holes with little strain

Who would dare to so complain.

That was only the first verse

I had to pause digging for a few minutes as a cardinal landed about four feet away. He looked me over, aware of my existence, but happy to feed on the numerous worms my sharp-edged shovel had just uncovered. The worms, not so much.

Rural birds – unless hummingbirds – will stay away. City birds think they own your place, which does have some truth to it. Their families were probably here before we moved in and will survive our departures. The robin hopped a few wet feet down behind a new hydrangea and went worm hunting out of sight.

My first planting project in this rain comes with a story. When Janet Hill and I married 63 years ago, we barely had a sharp-edged shovel between us. We washed clothes in a laundromat in those early romantic years. About five years into our marriage, we got an income tax return of $455. That same day we saw an ad for a washer and dryer on sale for $455. A message from God or Whirlpool.

“Edna-Hill Whirlpool” with double impatiens

We bought the pair, used it for 10 years , or so, and when the washer died, being a romantic sort, we saved the big washer tub and used it for a planter. We still do almost 60 years later. In this gentle rain, I set the tub in a semi-shady spot under a gingko tree. Then  planted four big, pink, double-impatiens inside this nicely aged planter we have come to personalize as “Edna-Hill Whirlpool.” Nostalgia is a terrible thing to waste.

Folks think you a silly fool

Others find it very cool

But we still have a basic rule

Love to Ms. Edna-Hill Whirlpool

The rain slowed a bit

I stuffed five more pink, double- impatiens  in a big, bright blue porcelain pot not too far from Edna. The moment of wet serenity lingered beneath my rain-soaked hat, along with a thought that another nine days of this might not be too bad, depending on the happiness of our sump pump.

Angelonia-purple rain plants

Four purple flowering Angelonia were planted over by our fence,  creating a division line between them and what we hope someday to be our small, native-wildflower plot. Some bossier purple heliotrope were planted nearby, adding to the theme. Purple rain.

Seeding wildflowers in the wet

Could  bring on gardening regret

But let us all please not forget

To be surprised at what we get.

All told, I was outside plotting, perusing, planting   and pruning for about three hours. I finished  happy-tired, as gardening does to all of us, but it all seemed more like a head-down 15 minutes. I took my soaked shoes off outside – they are well accustomed to that. My filthy, water-soaked gloves were hung on the outside railing for the time being, next to my drenched hat. The pants were removed three feet inside the kitchen. The washing machine lurked. My waiting breakfast-lunch was strawberries floating in oatmeal.

Your garden starts with tiny sprout

Attend it well in wet or drought.

It’s what the game is all about

Happiness is inside out.

I began with Gerber daisy

No fear there of being lazy

Not a plant to be called hazy

Flowers large and slightly  crazy.

So garden wettish when you can

Fear not the local weatherman

Mother Nature hatched her plan

About the time our world began.

My two gardening rants are both real and problematic originally appeared on GardenRant on May 27, 2026.

The post My two gardening rants are both real and problematic appeared first on GardenRant.