The sun has broken out, the snow is melting on the garden paths and I am thinking warm thoughts to hurry it all along. Among them I recall sitting with Rosemary Verey in her grotto cum conservatory on a cool English spring day, which leads to memories of the many women I’ve worked with, learned […]
Living in a house built in 1958, the design of which borrows heavily from California architect, Cliff May, I am only too aware that a Glasshouse structure suited to mid-century modern style needs to be spare in form and more committed to defining architectural space than serving as a decorative ornament. Having gone through several […]
Some years ago I wrote a book titled The Art of the Kitchen Garden about the evolution of fruit and vegetable growing and cookery from the 15th to the 18th century. Greenhouses evolved in part, I learned, from the introduction in the 17th century to Europe of the exotic pineapple, which quickly went from oddity […]
These days, more than ever, words matter. And in the realm of this column I got to wondering about the meaning of conservatory, which is more complex, it turns out, than the one for greenhouse. The latter is pretty much self-explanatory, a house where green things grow. But on turning to my copy of the […]
As I write this in the days before Thanksgiving, snow is falling steadily in the Rockies. It was 60 degrees yesterday, so I had an energetic day, washing windows (the better to see the snow!) and hauling the lawn furniture indoors. In these days of indoor/outdoor blurring, where the conservatory is another room of the […]
Stained glass windows have been around a good deal longer than Glasshouses, yet it would seem that the two have something to offer each other. Wafting around the National Botanic Garden of Ireland in September I was fulfilling a bucket list item; I’d long known about but never visited the graceful Curvilinear Range and its […]
Phillip Johnson’s “Glasshouse” in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of the icons of mid-century modern architecture. Steel-framed and glass-walled (hence its popular name) it seamlessly blends indoors and outdoors. It’s sophisticated simplicity has been the pattern for much early-21st century design. The photograph below, from my book, The Midcentury Modern Landscape, shows a Johnson-inspired modernist […]
“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow” is an old adage loaded with meaning, but one with special significance, I think, for us gardeners, knowing as we do that every garden begins with a seed. Seed can be “seed money” that lets us purchase a plot of land or rent space in a community garden. Seed […]
Mulch: the magic M-word that every gardener should know and practice, in the garden and even in the conservatory. Why mulch? Some may think that mulch is just cosmetic, improving the looks of a garden. That it does, but it’s main attraction is far more complex—and interactive set of attributes that keep the garden looking […]
A conservatory or greenhouse can be a heavenly – and heavily – scented environment when crammed full with perfumed flowers like jasmine, citrus, and countless other plants that hold fragrance in their petals and foliage. Pot pourri is an amalgam of plant parts preserved by drying and blending that will conserve the scent of garden […]
The Mid-Century Modern Landscape is the title of my recent book. It’s rather misleading because it’s about gardens: I’m old school and I think of landscape as the natural surroundings in which we build or shape our dreams: The Parthenon is set in a dramatic landscape; my greenhouse is part of my garden. Oh, well, […]
Glasshouse and conservatory construction have come a long way since the days of ancient Rome, when Pliny the Elder wrote about the Emperor Tiberius’s love of cucumbers. Such was the regal passion for the vegetable that he had, as Pliny described, “raised beds made in frames upon wheels, by means of which the cucumbers were […]
