GardenBook

 It's my habit to look back on gardens visited at the end of the year; and at the same time I start to look forward to what the next year holds. 2013 was particularly fine and I have high hopes for 2014. Any year that I have the opportunity to visit my friends in New England is a good one for me .  What accident of fate made me a California girl ? A beautiful , diverse state--4 hours to the dessert, 3 hours to the Sierra Nevada, 1 hour to our spectacular coast. 5 hours I'm in Oregon, 7 I'm in San Diego.Walk out my door, I'm in wine country. None of this is taken for granted. And even so, when I venture away from here , I can clearly see the attributes of places that are not California. My friend Sue is a New Englander, born and raised. She does battle with bugs that don't hang around at my house -thank god. She lives with that humid thing -but the tropicals love it.It actually rains in summer  and you can't buy that kind of water.  In July I have to put on lon...

  Travel on business to Boston put me in close proximity to my New England Idyll friends, so it was clearly imperative to squeeze out a couple of days to visit at least one of them. A rental car and an easy one hour drive on Saturday afternoon and I was in garden nirvanah .. Deannes wonderful garden in New Hampshire , with great food, great wine and sterling company. I'm still in recovery. The Tropical Border. I often speculate about the reactions of people who innocently wander on to Deannes street and are confronted with this..  I wonder how many private gardens in New Hampshire have Bromiliad Trees ? Two views of this one. Deannes collection of Bromiliads will be the subject of a future post. She seems to be making no attempt to control her addiction to this genus.. More from the tropical border The driveway garden...a personal favorite. This area has changed quite a bit since I first saw it; Deanne is transforming this into a s...