Deep in the Undergrowth

Changing My Mind

tomfischer — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:36:33 +0000

No one will ever accuse me of being a consistent gardener. No sooner have I settled on a color scheme or plant combination than a dandy new idea occurs to me and I want to change the whole thing. Maybe it’s a horticultural version of ADD. Its effects on the garden are probably not altogether [...]

The Lurie Garden: An Urban Masterpiece

tomfischer — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:51:28 +0000

Last summer I got my first glimpse of Chicago’s Lurie Garden, which nestles downtown in Millennium Park. It would be hard to imagine a more spectacular urban setting, with skyscrapers both old and new ringing the park, not to mention Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing of the Art Institute rising in austere splendor along the garden’s [...]

Espionage among the Shrubbery?

tomfischer — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:15:48 +0000

From the New York Times, June 29, 2010: 10 People Arrested Inside U.S. as Deep-Cover Russian Agents “Neighbors in Montclair, N.J., of the couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were flabbergasted when a team of F.B.I. agents turned up Sunday night and led the couple away in handcuffs. One person who lives nearby called them [...]

The Rare and the Common

tomfischer — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:19:41 +0000

It’s an affliction that besets most plant lovers: the desire to obtain specimens considered “rare and choice.” Sometimes these plants are beautiful; sometimes they’re merely odd (or “bios”—of Botanical Interest Only). Their most important characteristic, however, is that no one else you know has them. (Wilfrid Blunt, author of the landmark study The Art of [...]

Gin: The Gardener’s Friend

tomfischer — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:04:16 +0000

Summer, OverPlanters, has its unofficial start today, and you know what that means: gimlets, rickeys, martinis, Ramos fizzes, g-and-t’s, aviation cocktails, pegu clubs, tom collinses, Long Island iced tea, corpse revivers, and tipsy parsons—all of them concocted with that divinely limpid liquid, that nature’s balm, that friend of the hot and weary gardener: gin. Truly, gin [...]

Happy Birthday, Pacific Horticulture!

tomfischer — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:04:12 +0000

I know, I know, OverPlanters–I’ve been away for an unconscionably long time, for which my abject apologies. Life has a dreadful way of interfering with blogging. But I shall make amends. To begin with, I want to send a rousing Happy 35th Birthday to what is perhaps the best-written, best-edited, and most content-rich gardening magazine in [...]

Splendidly Silver: Helichrysum thianschanicum

tomfischer — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:47:41 +0000

Well, OverPlanters, I think it’s time for a plant profile, don’t you? But I must begin with an apology, for the plant in question is not yet widely available (although I trust it will become so), and while its origins would suggest a fair degree of cold-hardiness, it hasn’t been trialed widely enough to make [...]

A Snowdrop Myth Exploded

tomfischer — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:00:17 +0000

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. John Grimshaw, a charming and erudite “gardening botanist and author,” as well as co-author (with Matt Bishop and Aaron Davis) of Snowdrops: A Monograph of Cultivated Galanthus (Griffin Press, 2006). This handsome volume–which is difficult to come by in this country but can be found on [...]

My New Book Is Out!

tomfischer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:42:04 +0000

I know, OverPlanters, I know–it’s horribly immodest of me to trumpet the arrival of my new book; my mother would be positively pained. But it’s a sweet little book–just what you need to chase away the late-winter blahs–and people are actually saying nice things about it: “Fischer’s enthusiasm for flora shines through. . . . Whether [...]

Raising the Bar at Flower Shows

tomfischer — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:34:03 +0000

This past weekend, I visited Portland’s annual Yard, Garden and Patio Show (put on by the Oregon Association of Nurseries), which, I am happy to report, had lots of garden and very little patio. In fact, this regional show has been getting steadily better, and this year boasted a roster of speakers that would do [...]