Topic: Gardening
Gardening
What is a garden for? “Pleasure” is the obvious answer, though you’d never know it from reading Americans on the subject. We have an old habit in this country of weighing down our gardening—indeed, all our commerce with nature—with barrowfuls of moral and political significance, an inheritance, no doubt, from the Puritans and probably also
Breaking Ground; So Beautiful This Ghastly Flower
STRUGGLING the other evening to stake a particularly menacing Scotch thistle without incurring too great a loss of blood, I suddenly realized that Morticia Addams has become an important influence in my garden. I haven’t quite reached the point where I snip the blooms off my roses in order to showcase their thorns, but the
Opium Made Easy
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered
Gardening
Along with the seed catalogue, the book lies at the heart of the winter garden. Through its pages the gardener, who has worked more or less in isolation all summer, steps out into the wider gardening world, renewing his acquaintance with other gardeners and returning with a rich store of information—the printed kind, of course,
How Pot Has Grown
In a rented hall on the outskirts of Central Amsterdam, a couple of hundred American gardeners gathered over a holiday weekend not long ago to compare horticultural notes, swap seeds, debate the merits of various new hybrids and gadgets and, true to their kind, indulge in a bit of boasting about their gardens back home.
This Bud’s For You
MORE THAN A few eyebrows were raised in the world of gardening earlier this year when White Flower Farm, the tony Connecticut nursery, included a selection of annuals in its catalogue for the first time. Anywhere else, an offering of annuals—flowers that germinate, bloom, set seed and die in a single season—would be unremarkable: in
Against Nativism
THE STRAIGHT LINE IS IN BAD ODOR IN AMERICAN horticulture these days, along with just about anything else that smacks of Old World influence or the hand of man. This was first impressed on me rather violently a couple of years ago, after I published in these pages an account of a disastrous attempt at
The Seed Conspiracy
THIS IS THE SEASON OF THE garden seed, that time of pure promise when the entire contents of a quarter-acre patch of vegetables—the yield of which will burden a small truck come August—can still fit inside an envelope and be sent cross-country by Fed Ex. The seeds themselves betray no sign of the prodigies they
Look Who’s Saving Elm
Without question, the dinkiest plant in my garden these last few seasons has been the American elm tree my father-in-law gave me three years ago. I realize that “dinky” is not a word often attached to elm trees—”graceful” or “venerable” or even, in recent years, “dead” are a lot more like it. But there is
A Gardener’s Guide to Sex, Politics and Class
Call me bookish, but I bet there are many of us who choose their pastimes on the basis of the accompanying literature. Fly-fishing would hold little appeal if not for the shelf-ful of classics that comes with it, and until snowmobiling or pickerel-fishing acquire a halfway decent literature, people like me will have no trouble
