A Cooler Look at Colour
People who don’t know each other very well hardly ever talk about colour. It has an odd reputation for being personal. People say they “like” one colour or another, but after that there’s rarely any...
Pruning an Overgrown Mind
When you reach a certain age, you’re no longer the protagonist of your own actions: all you have left are the consequences of things you’ve already done. The seeds you’ve sown have been growing...
Garden Authorities
It’s raining. Again. In short, the weather is better-suited to reading and writing about gardens than to actually weeding or planting or musing, and it is making me think about the general run of...
Purple Toadflax
Purple Toadflax I have an image of a fastidious gardener weeding out everything without “papers,” that is, everything that didn’t either come with a name and pedigree or that self-seeds in everyday English (such...
New Perennialist Planting
It’s called a movement sometimes, this apparently loose-defined international way of thinking about plants. It’s “planting,” rather than “gardening.” It emphasises simple, minimal maintenance needs, variety, and an unstructured appearance a point in our...
Imperial Gardening
There are moments when it seems like gardening is English. I seem to recall sensing this even as a child, growing up in the American Midwest, that there were “English” gardens — either long-ago or far-way,...
