A room with a garden too!

When I travel to visit gardens my husband and I have fully embraced Airbnb accommodations. We’ve traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Canada and many of the US States staying with hosting individuals in a room with a view. We look for properties with photos of gardens as part of their home since that assures us we have something in common before we arrive. I have nothing but good things to say about this type of travel experience, we meet interesting people, enjoy fantasy real estate both in location and floor plans.  We find great surprises....   Continue Reading

Topiary Park, Columbus, Ohio

“a landscape of a painting of a landscape” 

Wander into the painting
Topiary Park in Columbus Ohio is an amazing landscape.  It is in the words of its creator, James T Mason, “a landscape of a painting of a landscape. … If an artist can paint a picture of a landscape — art mimicking nature — then why not a sculptor creating a landscape of a work of art — nature mimicking art? The topiary garden is both a work of art and a work of nature.”...   Continue Reading

Planting Fun In The Garden

For the past month, I have been on a long road trip driving highways in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and western New York. The long distances of highways are tunnels of green with tall maples and soaring oaks on either side. The view is occasionally broken up by homesites of impressive farms with huge barns and fields of green.  I’m looking for gardens along the way. ...   Continue Reading

Hortense had a garden

Hortense Miller Garden, Laguna Beach, CA

On a steep hillside of Boat Canyon overlooking artistic town of Laguna Beach and the Pacific Ocean is the two and a half-acre garden of Hortense Miller.  I’ve never met a person named Hortense, but if you are given such a name, the derivative of which is Hortus as in garden, it seems likely you would love a garden.  Hortense experienced a magical moment when she was five years old and her kindergarten teacher took the class on a walk “to look over a picket fence into the neglected front yard of an empty house. Thousands of dandelions had opened in the sunshine, standing knee-high in long grass”* and the glory of that moment influenced her for the rest of her life. By age 12 she declared she would: Never eat animals, never marry, and never have children. ...   Continue Reading

Daffodils, Jonquils, Narcissus, Oh My!

For those of us who love flowers, it is hard to imagine anything more delightful than Daffodils. This sunny yellow flower trumpets the return of spring showing up in gardens, paintings, and poems. Its arrival promises to end gray winter days.  If they are not sprouting up in your garden, you may find bundles of closed buds appearing in markets in early March. We snatch them up to bring the promise of sunshine into our homes. They are for me an addiction, I am determined to see them open and believe in the season to soon follow.  The sweet scent entices me to close my eyes and think of green shoots, fertile soil and blue skies. Addiction may be the right word as “Victorians once thought the scent of daffodils to be as dangerous as any narcotic.” (Kingsbury) We truly can be made to be fearful of anything....   Continue Reading

Gibbs Gardens, North Georgia Beauty

When you really, truly, deeply love gardens you are inspired to share this love with all you meet.  When your work in landscape design spans 40 years, while earning you and your landscaping firm 250 design awards, recognition from three US first ladies, (Johnson, Regan, and Carter) and every day you have ideas about what you would like to grow, why not make a garden as a gift to the land you love? Create the garden on land in the south, where your family has deep horticultural roots, where your grandmothers passed on their love of gardening to you. Seriously, why not?...   Continue Reading