At Hartley Botanic we have a good relationship with many knowledgeable garden writers both in the UK and USA – here you can enjoy reading their articles and gardening tips.
One of the best benefits of a greenhouse is bringing bulbs to bloom at the time when you most need them—décor, a celebration, or just for cheer in the darkest winter days. This month I’m talking with Brent Heath, the eponymous head of the family-owned mail order business, Brent and Becky’s. After an amazing number […]
Now that we’re well into fall, growing outdoors is almost impossible unless you have a greenhouse or some other protected enclosure. But how do you keep this environment sufficiently warm to prevent the winter cold from killing your plants, especially at night or on days without sunshine? There are more ways of doing this than […]
It’s bulb season. This will be a two-part column about how to enjoy growing bulbs inside a glasshouse. Most of this advice will also be useful for growing on a sunny windowsill. Next month I will talk about forcing other tender and hardy bulbs indoors. But this month, I’m talking about Amaryllis with Christian Curless, […]
“If you can read a book, you can do anything.” Short of embroidering it on a cushion, that’s a mantra I’ve lived by since my best friend in high school wised me up. I’ve packed in a lot of reading since then, researching the history of garden design and landscaping for the books I’ve written, […]
A year or so ago, a friend was throwing out a dozen ten-foot-long, one inch-diameter, galvanized pipes. I said I would take them with the thought in mind of building an affordable hoop house. Having filled my 300-square-foot heated greenhouse with more than 200 plants, and with more plants than I intended in my unheated […]
There was an unforeseen delay in my getting this letter written – the peaches on my elderly tree were ripe and the weather was due to change overnight from 90° and bluebird skies to 55° and sodden grey. Welcome to the Front Range. With the right kind of greenhouse this wouldn’t be a problem: the […]
In the busy life of a home gardener, tools are essential. However, if your time is like mine, in the garden and the greenhouse, I’m more focused on caring for plants than I am on caring for tools. And yet, as my friend and artist Phyllis Helland observed, “A shovel easily knifing into the soil—there’s […]
There’s a new Greenhouse in my town. It’s a Hartley, and its owner is Mary Maroney, who invited me to visit. So one lovely summer evening I did just that, enjoying a glass of wine in Mary’s equally lovely Greenhouse. When Mary was a young girl in grade school, she was asked to draw what […]
As fall approaches, it’s time for a thorough cleaning, repainting, and upgrading of my greenhouse. One of the projects on my list this year is automating various systems. Given the large number and variety of plants in my greenhouse, maintaining the optimal environment there can be challenging. Automation can facilitate this process for watering, heating, […]
In a corner of England, long, long ago, a young woman with visions of the epic garden she was planting, sowed seeds of milk thistle, Silybum marianum. HUGE mistake! Little did I know (yes, moi) that the enchanting, fresh young foliage, shimmering with silvered veins in the Norfolk sunshine, would age to old boot leathers […]
After the heat and stress of the day, evening is a perfect time to enjoy our gardens. So, creating vignettes of what works best in the falling light is important. White flowers are touted for evening and moon gardens because other colors fade back, but the same is true for light-colored foliage, especially the silvers. […]
Forest bathing, or taking an aware walk in the woods, has become popular for its health benefits—it’s known to lower blood pressure and boost immunity. The name is a literal translation of the Japanese term shinrin-yaku, or taking in the forest atmosphere. Last weekend I had a chance to go on a guided forest-bathing walk […]
