a garden maker's notes

The yellow’s the long flowering Gaillardia ‘Lemons and Oranges’ and the Allium is a August blooming ornamental onion.  The variety’s a mystery to me.  I tried to identify it on the web, but the photos chiefly display the round flower head without reference to scale. Reading text descriptions on other websites, I’m at a loss for this plant’s [...]

Best looking rock , stump, and plant combination ever!  While wandering the charming grounds of the amazingly good Jacob’s Pillow Dance in Becket, MA, I found this shady corner.  The perennial geranium (probably a geranium macrorrhizum) meanders and cascades throughout the bed to showcase the stump as a special and sculptural object d’art.   A couple of  hosta and good sized rocks [...]

The back garden path all-but-disappears by mid-summer. This is not a mistake, but intended. By the sixth month it  becomes a  path of  lush abundance. Not unlike the journey in many Japanese gardens where you are forced because of the unevenness of the stone path to look at down your feet and thus encounter something not seen when looking [...]

Yellow perennial Digitalis grandiflora and red Dianthus ‘Frosty Fire”? highlight the foliage of Hemerocallis and Enkianthus

White Iris  siberica, blue and yellow Hosta ‘Francis Williams’, yellow Hosta ‘Sum and Subtance’, pink Agilegia

Designed as a journey of garden moments–sometimes at first all I see are the weeds and the plants that need dead heading. Then the magic takes [...]