Rhode Island Feeds

It’s still January for at least for another day or so, but it looks strangely an awful lot like mid-February – or even March here and there, and feels about the same. My brain thinks that means that May is right around the corner. But it isn’t. Not by a long shot. We can’t have [...]

It is prettier than the old map, interactive (click on it to check out the zip code zone finder), and the information is finally up to date. But it’s not good news and there are no surprises here. Nothing we haven’t already figured out for ourselves. The new map is based on weather-station data collected [...]

Snow finally fell in measurable amounts (about 9″) over the weekend forcing us to take life a little more slowly. I think that’s what I love best about a snow days: permission to slow down and tuck in. Luckily I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be as the snow fell and I hope you [...]

Just in time for winter to finally look and feel more like a proper winter, Gail and I are sliding headfirst towards spring. We started the new year by looking through magazine back issues for inspiration. (Do you do that too? It’s as if I never saw them before – and in some cases I [...]

Gardeners are reputed to be an optimistic group but I think we might just be stubborn. Most of us at least are prone to occasional – usually weather related – bouts of pessimism, gloom-and-doom opinion competitions, and worry. But no matter how dire we guess things will be, giving up is never an option. (And [...]

I’m still on seedheads. Yesterday afternoon Gail and I attended a workshop on propagating Rhody Natives (in caps because it’s an initiative spearheaded by the RI Natural History Survey and the New England Wildflower Society to get commercial nurseries involved in propagating Rhode Island’s own native plants both for conservation projects and to sell in [...]

The other day Gail brought in an old book, Designing with Plants by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf and Noël Kingsbury. As I flipped through it, a little lightbulb blinked. Oudolf says the best way to approach garden design is to consider the plant’s – or flowers’ – form first, then its leaves, and color [...]

Over at Gardening Gone Wild, Debra Lee Baldwin (author of a couple of beautiful books on succulents) showed off a few examples of “potting area perfection”, including her own, and it got me thinking about the place where Gail and I spend so much time we sort of take it for granted. The greenhouses’ headhouse [...]

Last but never least, are the little things I love. You know I am all for outstanding plants – I always have to grow a few big ones that grab attention and don’t let it go for a minute. Fuller’s teasel, castor beans, and my very favorite 6 footer, Gomphocarpus physocarpus ‘Oscar’ (aka hairy balls) [...]

As we’re blown toward a new year, I feel bound by tradition – or is it just habit? – to take a look back at the past year and make endless lists of plants to know and grow (and not grow). Below is a continuation of a list I started the other day of the [...]

Last year Steve Aitken, the editor of Fine Gardening magazine, sent out a survey inspired by the list of 100 essential country-music songs Johnny Cash shared with his daughter Rosanne. Steve asked for a list of top 10 (plus one) essential plants that we thought every newbie gardener ought to know about. I’m thrilled to [...]

By the looks of a stubborn delphinium in the Rose Garden, I’m not the only one who would prefer to think of the winter solstice as the official start of summer. But winter might actually be here at long last. A cold blast over the past weekend froze the pond into a scattered ream of [...]

Looking back at my past December Garden Blogger Bloom Day posts I’m actually a little bit surprised that I remembered them wrong. I thought we had had late color in years past but this year really is unusual for the length of the lingering fall. A lot of the plants in bloom now are the [...]

Despite increasingly frosty temperatures some plants in the garden seem unable to resist the urge to keep growing and are lending a whole new meaning to the idea of “evergreen”. Usually by now have extolled the virtues of evergreen foliage in the garden: how essential it is for structure and color particularly through the winter [...]

The best thing about hypertufa troughs is that they give us a place to plant tiny fragile things that might otherwise be lost, trampled, or overtaken in our gardens. They are also especially perfect for anyone interested in alpines who might not have a dedicated or perfectly situated rock garden. – We do have a [...]

Ever since Gail and I went on a bus trip to Wave Hill – eight or so years ago – we’ve been coveting hypertufa troughs. A year or two after that trip we each made a couple, then a year later a couple more. After that, Fred and Dan made some, including the thyme bench [...]

In the last post I mentioned that Gail and I just picked more vegetables for the East Bay Food Pantry. It’s no accident that we still have veg to pick. Back in the middle of September we took a little gamble and seeded down a big quilt of lettuce, rows of super-sweet and tiny early [...]

Fall is dragging its feet getting into winter and although some people and plants I know are ready for it to be cold, it couldn’t be a sweeter treat for us gardeners. We’ve been braced for bitter winds and flurries ever since the first frost (which came with bitter winds and flurries) but have been [...]

To me it still feels too early to talk about the holidays – I avert my eyes from any commercial Christmas display at least until the day after Thanksgiving – but Blithewold’s decorators have been thinking about Christmas since … well, February anyway. And they’ve been elfishly at work decorating the mansion since the middle [...]

After Tropical Storm Irene stripped the color from so many trees around here back in August I was pretty pessimistically convinced that fall color would be lousy this year. And maybe that’s why it has seemed especially spectacular. There’s less of it to be sure, and it was more sudden and fast passing than usual [...]