GardenBook

 I love visiting New England. Love the gardens, love the seafood, the charming villages and appreciate the tropical-esqe summer temps; i.e. it's warm at night. And even more important, the company of friends who have welcomed me into their home and gardens and facilitated my visits to both private and public gardens throughout the northeast.  Back in June 2014, I added Rhode Island to my 'visited states' list.The entirety of Rhode Island is not much larger than Napa County , and in spite of its tiny size still features 400 miles of coastline by virtue of the tentacles of land reaching into the Atlantic. Friends who live in New England annually make the pilgrimage to Farmers Daughter Nursery in Kinsgton RI and always include a meal at Matunuck Oyster Bar . Seared scallops and a cold local beer for lunch-nothing better !  After looking at photos of both plants and food for a few years I finally got to join in. If you find yourself in that area I enthusiastically...

 It has been an unacceptably long time since I had the opportunity to see what is going on in my own garden. It either has been raining (and raining and raining) or other commitments pulled me away. My garden viewing has been pretty much limited to the short distance from the mailbox to the front door. Those brief trips were enough to tell me I have a serious weed problem. In fact  I can't ever recall an early spring this bad. I believe the seeds of these damnable things must have been laying around waiting for the torrential rains we've experienced in the last couple months after years of drought.The ground is so saturated that pulling them is still impossible ; they either bring up a tennis ball sized blob of mud with them that won't shake off, or they break off at the soil level. I need two weeks of dry weather and 3 yards of mulch. This weekend has been splendid, warm temps, no rain and I spent most of it trying to get  a handle on the rose pruning and fall/spring cle...

  In January I typically try to work on my  ever burgeoning photo files; adding keywords, deleting the crappy images, mapping and editing , and it was during this process I realized I had many photos of gardens I had never  shared on the blog. Since it is apparently never going to stop raining this winter I plan to put together a few Throwback Thursday posts featuring some of these past garden visits.   In the summer of 2012 I and a group of gardening friends toured the Pacific Northwest . It was a memorable trip that included among others, the garden of Little and Lewis (since closed to tours) Dan Hinkleys' Windcliff ( no photos allowed in those days) the Danger Garden and a visit to the iconic private garden of Linda Cochran. How we managed to score a private tour of Lindas' garden I can't recall, but I do know I can't take credit for it. Nevertheless it is all the more a significant visit to me now; this home and garden were sold and Linda has started a new, s...