a garden maker's notes

Mid-day yesterday I finally got outside to see what I had been admiring all morning from my office window. Not the best time of day to photograph, but today it’s about what I can share.  And I can share my delight in the red tulips that capture my attention with their vivid cheerfulness.  Coupled with [...]

Wandering the Boston Flower and Garden Show last Saturday, random people asked me repeated about one particular plant.  Maybe it’s because I was wearing my Speaker’s Badge and looked official.  Which plant you ask?  the Hellebore.  Seems to be the year of the Hellebore for me. At least at the show and in my front [...]

The Boston Flower Show open through March 18th stimulates all your senses. I’ve so many great photos of  beautiful garden rooms with lovely details and features. Difficult to choose one photo, but the enchantment in the exhibit designed as a children’s garden featured above won my vote this morning. As a landscape exhibit Judge representing the [...]

This subtle pallet drew me to this woodland winter place. Indeed the hues of white, silvery green, blues, brown, and charcoal color my living room. I love the contrast of large and small, vertical and horizontal. Tree trunks of varying widths painted with splotches of silvery green lichen contrasts with narrower branches of saplings and [...]

Away over President’s Day holiday weekend, I returned to find the Witch Hazel ‘Arnold’s Promise’ in full bloom! This wonderful Hamamelis leads the way to springs’ bounty. Depending on the winter it blooms from anywhere from late January or early February to April. In last year’s record- setting cold and deep snow cover winter it [...]

Twenty degrees Fahrenheit at 9am on a Sunday morning.  A cold January New England day with a wind chill factor of 0!  I spotted this evergreen fern thriving in this hundred fifty year old foundation wall. Cold or not, I paused to admire and dig out my camera. The field-stone wall retains the glacier made [...]

I snapped this photo on New Year’s Day–Just before I took down the Christmas tree.  I so enjoyed the view of the tree, the deck containers filled with winter greens, and the forest landscape beyond. I also like the way the railing pickets’ shadows and the lower containers’ foliage create patterns on the deck. And [...]

Inspired, I snapped this enchantingly beautiful sky. Conversing with a friend in the Historic Town Center in Sudbury, Massachusetts I happened to look up and out, and was stopped in my tracks by the sky’s stunning beauty. New England offers such beautiful skies. Especially, I love the crisp and brilliantly clear night skies at this [...]

Winter Solstice Day I noticed this hellebore in my front garden. But it felt more like a discovery as it’s  fully budded and this in not England where they bloom at this time of year. Because it was such an unusually warm day–50 degrees to start the day–I took the opportunity to cut back my [...]

Mid-December in New England our landscapes and gardens are more about form, structure, and texture than flowers. We can still create delight in our winter landscapes but no flowers. The plants that summered on the shady patio and then were moved indoors in mid- September to avoid the first hard frost to a holding area [...]