Up in our neck of the northern woods, you catch the first signs of spring in the mosses on the forest trails. On a dank cloudy day, they appear to glow like emerald velvet clouds come down to earth to hug the rocks.
By the time you hit mid-April, life has erupted in micro with the first ephemerals and sedges poking their heads up from the tapestry of the woodland floor.
If my last post was long and winding, I’m keeping this one short and sweet.
I was recently asked to be a guest on the star-spangled Native Plant Podcast to talk about all things New Perennial. The show is quite a hoot with a native spin on plants and garden design, hosted every week by amiable landscape designer and plantsman, John C Magee with co-host artist/designer Preston Montague filling in this time around.
Podcasts are a happening thing. In many ways, they feel like an audio throwback to the days of vintage radio and theatre of the mind.
It’s that special time when newspaper columnists and writers like to stir the pot with predictions of ‘What’s Hot & What’s Not’ for the coming year.
While they compile such trend lists for the world of gardening, I rarely pay attention because making a garden is really more of a long-term affair.
Coming into 2017 though, I’ve noticed a definite trend in the ether: A few garden writers have surprisingly declared that the New Perennial trend of naturalistic gardening along with its trademark use of ornamental grasses, is on its way out.
Are they right? Or are they wrong?
These are dark days indeed.
All traces of life slowly fade from the landscape as the hours shorten and shadows lengthen.
The autumnal dance now done, the trees lie brittle and bare to the sky. The last perennials splay and shiver like a ghost army defeated by the rain and wind.
But with this kind of darkness, there is nothing to fear.
My first morning in Chicago, I found myself inside a giant silver bean.
Actually, it was a rare moment of solitude inside Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate on my way to see Piet Oudolf and his urban masterpiece, The Lurie Garden.
Not just any public garden, the Lurie is built atop a massive parking garage roof, transformed by architectural sleight-of-hand into a slice of incandescent prairie in the heart of the downtown’s Millennium Park.
