Design

I attended a most interesting symposium 'Speaking of Plants' this weekend at the NC Arboretum.  The draws for me were Fergus Garrett (Head Gardener and CEO at Great Dixter, an amazing garden in the south of England developed by Christopher Lloyd) and Carol Reese, an Extension Agent from Tennessee, who has an excellent reputation as a speaker. Neither disappointed. Fergus Garrett was remarkable. An excellent plantsman and gardener, to be sure, he articulated a continuing vision for Great Dixter in a way that brought it to life, and his second talk about plant combinations and succession planting was excellent -- I wanted to sign up immediately for a week-long course at Great Dixter, and I'm not really a practitioner of intensive gardening.   But I loved his focus on plants and their characters;  pay attention to their foliage, not just their flowers, he said, and how they look throughout the season. It was an great symposium (even if way too heavy on the lectures; as...

Those of us in warm climates have LONG gardening seasons, and fall vegetable gardens do wonderfully well, with the hardiest kales and cabbages overwintering for spring harvest. Often winter varieties of lettuce and spinach overwinter, too, providing a head start on late winter and early spring growth. It's hard to imagine on a hot, humid August day, when parched plants are grateful for the hose. My second round of squash and tomatoes are doing well, although the dry weather is encouraging powdery mildew on squash leaves. Not surprisingly, the root-knot nematodes problems in the main vegetable garden weren't vanquished by the supposed predatory nematodes, but I did get quite a few squash and beans from early plantings before they went into decline (and show the definite knobby galls of root-knot nematodes on their roots). But fall is not far away, and I'm thinking about the different varieties of kale, spinach, and lettuce (as well as beets, chard, and turnips) to sow in th...