I gave this speech last month to the audience and Class of 2007 at my old boarding school.

Good morning, Mimi, good morning ladies & gentlemen of The Orme School, good morning young ladies and young men.

This place is utterly fantastic. I’m not sure if you all are aware of this. It’s like Oz. I come back here after 5, 10 or 15 years and each time I… Continue reading

After closing our fiscal year at Burpee Seeds, I noticed some intriguing figures in the sales of flower and vegetable seeds to home gardeners that, while displaying great differences, also show affinities that would warm a compost heap. Politics, in my opinion, is not so much a contest between different states of red and blue as between different shades of green—a comforting reality in today’s frosty political climate.Lets’ first examine… Continue reading

My next project is night gardening. Once during the Q & A part of a speech I gave in New York City, a petite elderly lady popped up and asked, “What do you offer for a night garden?” I mumbled something about moonflowers, four o’clocks and an especially iridescent pale petunia I’ve since forgotten. But her querulous Miss Evesham voice haunted me like The Night-Blowing Cereus in Thornton’s painting. Last… Continue reading

As Election Day nears, I issue an appeal to my fellow gardeners: Make yourself heard. Leave off your harvesting, raking and mulching for a minute and broadcast, not just your spring bulbs, but your beliefs.There are approximately 78 million gardeners in the U.S. – a number greater than either major political party. It is time we combined forces to effect change outside of the garden. I have a name for

I played high school varsity football, joining surprisingly but indifferently in my freshman year, because on the one hand I was an unusually large kid, and on the other I found boarding school a distracting environment. I couldn’t get into the “Kill, Kill, Kill!” spirit. I was too green, the only freshman on the team.But Coach Casey was quiet and charismatic, with an angelic wife and a daughter with a… Continue reading

May Theilgaard Watts Reading The Landscape Of America — Botanical observation and nature writing combined in a stylish book with charming illustrations, perhaps the best of its kind. A legend in Chicago and long associated with the Morton Arboretum, May Watts was a Julia Child of botany. Sometime in the sixties when my mother took her classes, she managed to drag me along, probably—to be honest—because she couldn’t… Continue reading

We recently returned from a wonderful trip to our Heronswood Gardens in Kingston, Washington. After the dust and petals settled, we puzzled over a few issues.First, what kind of garden is the main one at our research station there? The one the founders modestly called “The Big Bang”?

It isn’t an ornamental or decorative garden, such as you’d find adjacent to, for example, a government building, with its broad lawn and… Continue reading