Month: March 2020

  I visited the beautiful 15-acre Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, last month. The Living Museum was tricked out like an Easter egg hunt. There were eggs, for sure, and other oft-repeated motifs from Salvador Dali’s paintings. The conservatory and gardens were overrun with eggs, lips, eyes, pianos, butterflies and mustaches. Orchids, bromeliads, tropical pitcher plants, cacti and strangler figs were backdrop features of this quirky mash-up. The planting schemes were well designed, the maintenance superb. Mustachioed air plant. Tillandsia x ‘Wonga’ Photo by Charles Murray. I’d barely walked 25 feet into the conservatory before I wondered: Who’s taking care of this magnificence?  I asked a friendly docent. She gave glowing credit to Mike McLaughlin and Angel Lara for the skillful upkeep. McLaughlin and Lara are, respectively, director of horticulture and greenhouse manager. I emailed McLaughlin last week and he responded:“The Dalí exhibit is pretty unusual, eh? Angel … Read More

Previous articleGood Plant, Bad Plant, Native and Non-Native. Is it That Simple? Next articleThe garden is never closed Susan’s a garden writer, teacher and activist in the Washington, D.C. area. Co-founder of GardenRant, she also wrote for national gardening magazines and independent garden centers before retiring in 2014. Now she has time for these projects: Founding and now managing the pro-science educational nonprofit GOOD GARDENING VIDEOS that finds and promotes the best videos on YouTube for teaching people to garden. Creating and managing DC GARDENS, the nonprofit campaign to promote the public gardens of the Washington, D.C. area, and gardening by locals. Creating and editing the community website GREENBELT ONLINE to serve her adopted hometown of Greenbelt, Maryland (a “New Deal Utopia” founded in 1937). Contact Susan via email or by leaving a comment here. Photo by Stephen … Read More

Hope I’ll soon be able to make a haul like this again, but safely. That was the question yesterday, as local green industry owners and employees were discussing whether or not garden centers were one of the (many) essential businesses allowed to operate while New York State is “on pause.” The long list includes things like anything medical (of course), police, fire, grocery stores, banks, utilities, construction, and many other businesses, including liquor stores (I agree). You won’t find garden centers on this list, except for an agriculture/farms item. Hence the anxiety among many; it’s almost time here to start pruning roses and pick up a few flats of pansies. There has been some clarity. According to the New York State Department of Agriculture, “Garden centers, nurseries and greenhouses that grow food crops, including fruit trees, fruiting shrubs, vegetable starts or herbs are considered essential business under the farm … Read More

We bought our first house in 1986. Not long afterwards, we met the neighbor from three doors down. His name was Ethan Becker. His grandmother and mother wrote the first Joy of Cooking. Among many other things, he was working on an updated edition, which would publish in 1997. Ethan lived in “Cockaigne”, the Bauhaus home which his father had designed. The kitchen was surprisingly tiny, but the landscape was expansive, about eight acres. One of our favorite parts about it was a wildflower garden his mother, Marion Rombauer Becker, had planted, beginning, I’m guessing, in the early 1940s. This garden featured prominently in the 1971 classic, Wild Wealth, which she co-wrote with Paul Bigelow Sears and Frances Jones Poetker, and was illustrated by Janice Rebert Forberg. From the book, one can envision a garden that was filled in its heyday with an unbelievable assortment of plants. However, by the... Read More