June 2011
26 posts
Monthly Garden Report for June
I’m always depressed at the end of June. I spend all of late winter, spring, and early summer working hard in the garden and see it all pay off this month. The beginning is glorious, spectacular, brilliant. By the time the early summer floral explosion wanes, I’m done. I don’t care what mid-summer bloomer is coming on. It’s hot outside, plants are floppy in the mid-day sun,...
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A Morning with David Salman
For those who don’t know who David Salman is, he has been at the center of redefining gardening in the western United States for the past 30 years. He opened up Santa Fe Greenhouses in the seventies, and in the mid-eighties started the plant mail-order catalog of High Country Gardens. He’s also been a key figure behind many of the native plant programs which have successfully...
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National Geographic's Article in this Month's... →
Really excellent article with fascinating and useful links. Take time to read it.
The Unsustainable Garden
I recently read a flashy magazine article for a “sustainable” garden and it put a bee in my bonnet. A garden can be described as many things: a world set apart, a collection of plants, a place to grow food, somewhere to relax or play, a showpiece. But sustainable? I doubt it. For me, the “sustainable garden” is an oxymoron on the same tier as the “low-maintenance...
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Poppies Will Make You Sleep
When I was 7, and I learned I lived near a watercolor painter, I took my waxy Crayola watercolors to a stack of blank dot-matrix feed and doorbell-ditched that prolific portfolio on his mat.
So once a week, after dinner, I’d walk to lessons on the alchemy of color and how to make a brush yield to the hand. Just before the beginning of his dirt driveway, I’d pass the backyard
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“Perhaps the preciousness about plants is informed by a kind of...”
– Anne Wareham, The Bad-Tempered Gardener. Frances Lincoln. London. 2011. pg.109.
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From John Muir’s account of Salt Lake City, excerpted from “City of the Saints,” Steep Trails. 1918.
The mountains rise grandly round about this curious city … so grandly that the city itself is hardly visible. The Wahsatch Range, snow-laden and adorned with glacier-sculpted peaks, stretches continuously along the eastern horizon, forming the boundary of the Great Salt...
June-itis
I’m finding it difficult to write. It could be from having the kids home now that school’s out. It’s probably just June. Such an indulgent month — all sun and show and the long smell of irises and roses. Let the grass grow tall. Let dinner make itself. Just top off my glass with the waters of Lethe and a sprig of mint until July’s heat melts it all away.
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