Garden Articles | A Traveling Gardener

Promenade, 91st Street, Riverside Drive

Hearts & Flowers

Some of my favorite grade school memories are from Valentine’s Day. We decorated boxes with red paper hearts, pink ribbons and flowers. In the days leading up to the celebration we watched as classmates slipped envelopes inside and anticipated the sweetness the messages would reveal. The celebration of Valentine’s Day has spread around the world. The day has something for every sense; chocolates for taste, flowers for scent and beauty, romantic words and cuddles of affection, an infusion of delights engaging our emotions.... Continue Reading

Garden of Useful Plants, Montreal Botanic Garden

A Year of Happy!

Inspired by a new year we follow a familiar path as we resolve to; spend more time with family & friends, learn something new, help others, eat better, exercise more, reduce stress, and save money. The list designed to inspire us to be our better selves often does just the opposite and creates more stress within the first month of the year. If only there was an easy way to achieve these resolutions! Well, “There is a garden for that!”... Continue Reading

Rooftop Gardening

Up on the rooftop. . . .

Where will gardening grow as more than 1/2 the world’s population moves into urban environments? (citymayors.com) Urban living is associated with greater opportunities yet one cost of city life is giving up ready access to green space and gardens. Is the future a space age view like the Jetsons or will gardeners prevail and work green space into the picture?... Continue Reading

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, NY

Grateful for Gardeners who keep the garden alive

November is a month for Thanksgiving and we celebrate it with a feast of food symbolizing the harvest celebration. Gardens, and those who tend them give us much to be thankful for throughout the year.... Continue Reading

Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, CA

“gardening, more than architecture, more than painting, more than music, and far more than literature, is an ephemeral art; its masterpieces disappear leaving little trace.” – History of Garden Design... Continue Reading

Too hot to garden?

Furnace Creek Inn, Death Valley, CA

As the summer heat wears on I wonder if I might feel cooler thinking of places that are hotter and drier than where I am. So Death Valley National Park and Furnace Creek CA spring to mind. Just the names sound hot and years of record high heat support its reputation of the hottest, driest, and lowest place in the U.S. Though Death Valley was set aside as a protected area in 1933, it didn’t become a National Park until 1994. Always curious about this fierce sounding place I was completely surprised by the flowers of the park and the oasis garden at the Furnace Creek Inn. Travel really does break apart our preconceived notions of a place.... Continue Reading

Plant People

San Diego Botanic Garden

Just before the killer cold snap last January I had managed to prune my torch bougainvillea into a heart shape topiary. It made me smile and I eagerly looked forward to it as part of the landscape for a Valentine celebration in February. Then nature changed my plans and the shape was lost in the freeze damage. A topiary is a fanciful thing, it isn’t a garden style that appeals to everyone. It is a living work of art that requires a vision, patience and an artist using the medium of plants.... Continue Reading

Is This A Garden?

“What makes gardens especially interesting is that making one constitutes creation of a new world–our own world.” – American Eden, Wade Graham... Continue Reading

Garden of Fragrance

“Stumbling on new smells is one of the delights of traveling.” – Diane Ackerman

In a small conservatory built of red brick with huge copper framed windows and an interior graced with a pair of white doves in an ornate wire cage, pots of fragrant white lilies perfumed the air. A woman walked in followed reluctantly by a tween age girl. “Ewww!” the child cried out, “what’s that smell?” Her mother, perhaps by now frustrated at her daughter’s lack of enthusiasm for this day in the garden, replied, “It’s fresh air.” The daughter’s reply, “Well, I don’t like it!”... Continue Reading

Counting Plants

Not everything that can be counted counts, Not everything that counts can be counted. – Albert Einstein

Winding uphill through the streets of Berkeley, we arrive at the University of CA Botanical Garden in Strawberry Canyon. There we are faced with a decision of paying the parking meter for the number of hours we need to explore the garden. The garden holds over 12,000 plants including many rare and endangered plant specimens. Director Paul Licht does the math for visitors. “If you allow only 2 hours, a 120 min. visit would require that you see 100 different kinds of plants per minute to experience our entire collection.” Obviously we will need a full day, even then we won’t truly see all of the plants. Those we do see will be only a glimpse of life of the plants. A plant today may be dormant, budding, blooming or declining.... Continue Reading