My mom once asked me which sense I’d give up if I had to, sight or hearing? A teenager at the time, I wondered if it was a trick question. I thought about the blind people I’d seen tapping their canes along the sidewalks, and answered, “Hearing”. She told me she’d give up sight. I [...]
Sometime in the mid 70s, I celebrated a party with friends at a then-landmark French restaurant in Chicago—the first of the “nouvelle”—called Le Perroquet. (There I tasted my first “mesclun” salad.) As we talked and dined I discerned, through the wine haze, that the place was utterly unique. Outside New Orleans, New York or San Francisco, no place like it existed, since fish was the focus. Thirty years ago, old…
During the mid-nineties I shuttled between Philadelphia, Chicago, Frankfurt and Cairo at least a dozen times. For pleasure, Cairo won hands down. From ’94 to ’97 I spent about four months in and around Cairo trying to launch a vegetable division of a corn seed company. Alas, without success. However, I became acquainted with some of the most interesting and friendly people on earth. Nothing beats a European education, and…
Six to ten footers make a garden tingle. Here is a selection of vigorous and widely adaptable perennials, shrubs, grasses—and even a five foot fern. All do well nearly everywhere in the U.S., feel huge and add great drama to the garden.
Name
Zones
Height
(Plants)
Delphinium elatum ‘Blue Lace’
3-7
6 feet
Lilium pardalinum
5-8
7 feet
Cephalaria gigantea
3-7
8 feet
Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’
4-9
8 feet
Thalictrum ‘Elin’
5-9
10 feet
(Shrubs)
Weigela [...]
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