It has taken three years—THREE YEARS!  After waiting, not so patiently, for three years, I finally managed to get a shot of a goldfinch munching away on coneflowers seeds.   Goldfinches are tiny birds, maybe three inches from beak to tail.  They are also very skittish.  Sometimes they come inContinue Reading

Every winter, I look back over flower season to rue mistakes and cheer successes. This year has been a mixture of both. Since 2014, the first season, I have documented the garden—first with an iPhone 4s, and now with an iPhone 8 and Minolta Maxxum 7D. Documenting is a separateContinue Reading

Undoubtedly, this sounds like a stupid question. The question struck me as somewhat foolish as well, since I had just spent three hours yanking weeds. But, the thing is, some of those weeds I kind of liked. After thinking about this question for a day or so, I looked upContinue Reading

Phloxes are great garden flowers. They have beautiful blooms and smell as if they could be an ingredient in Sweet & Sour Tarts. I have had good luck growing regular garden phlox and creeping phlox, but I’ve planted dwarf phlox multiple times, and it has never made it past aContinue Reading

At the end of the first season of the garden, when the frost hit and everything died, I felt such a sense of loss. Browns replaced greens, indigos, pinks, yellows, and lavenders. Gray skies joined the brown and muted the landscape. Sunny days only made the loss more noticeable. ButContinue Reading

I have always given credit to impressionist painters for the juxtaposition of colors in my garden. Purple shades are next to yellow hues, and red crocosmia flutes are surrounded by greens. The bellflowers, the closest to being blue, are next to purples, and the only orange blooms have a yellowContinue Reading

There is nothing like using fresh herbs for cooking. When I lived in apartments, I usually tried to grow herbs with varying degrees of success. Basil usually worked well, as did thyme. Rosemary never worked—it always died. Naturally, when I planted a flower garden, I saved a small area forContinue Reading

By season four, I had settled on all the perennials. There were many failures before getting to that point. I love hyssop, but cannot grow it. Speedwell and geum did not work out either. Those failures left both gaps in the yard and me yearning for more color. I decidedContinue Reading