Last week a friend mentioned seeing a yellow-flowering shrub on the VFW Parkway in Boston. It reminded me of the show of Hamamelis that used to appear outside of the Harvard Business School’s Baker Library back in the early 80s; when I first saw it (this was a few years before I became a [...]
Archive for the ‘Plants’ Category
It’s that season
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged city plantings, Plants, urban plantings on March 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Deskside greenery
Posted in Biodiversity and Biophilia, Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Plants, What we're thinking, Working Landscape, tagged Plants on February 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Another grey and cold day in a long, cold month. Going to my desk and working is a good antidote to the gloominess, especially when the Cattleya next to my drawing board blooms (as it did last fall), or the Ripsalis in the window each January reliably turns from a mop of green string [...]
On the Greenway
Posted in Biodiversity and Biophilia, Places, Plants, Toby's posts on January 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Save Boston’s Greenway Gardens is a facebook page (here) and a web site (here) devoted to protecting and enhancing the three blocks of gardens on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. (For more, look here and here and here too.)
Keep ‘em green!
Herbie
Posted in Deb's posts, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, tree planting, trees on January 25, 2010 | 4 Comments »
I just wrote a post on Herbie, the champion American elm in Yarmouth, Maine, that was taken down last week after a life that spanned more than two centuries. The post, at Taking Place In The Trees, included several photos I took the day before Herbie came down. In his prime, Herbie was [...]
Massachusetts Arbor Day of Service
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Miscellaneous, Plants, tagged engage with landscape, trees on December 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Massachusetts Arborists Association has a new volunteer initiative starting in 2010. They aim to build on the traditional Arbor Day celebration by instituting a statewide volunteer service day on that day, which falls on April 30, 2010.
To get the ball rolling, the MAA is inviting anyone to identify potential tree care projects in [...]
What’s wrong with these pictures?
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Miscellaneous, Plant management, Plants on December 14, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Say you’re a growing country club in a nicely-treed community, and you need to enlarge your parking lot. And perhaps you want to lower its grade. The lot has some mature oak trees in it, and they add a certain je ne sais quoi to the scene, so you decide to save the [...]
Aster
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Plants, tagged Plants on December 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »
So we’ve started down this path, which in a time typically relatively quiet in plant color may not be such a bad thing. These Purple Dome asters gave a great show on one of my projects this fall, and enlivened the scene when other plants were fading to gold and rust.
other colors
Posted in Plants, Toby's posts on December 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Small-space gardening
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, hedge alternatives, landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, pruning practices, small-space gardening on November 3, 2009 | 2 Comments »
We’ve all seen photos of grand mixed and perennials borders on old country estates (Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Beatrix Farrand),
and of sweeps of perennials, grasses and shrubs by the contemporary designer Piet Oudolf and landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden.
They’re dramatic and luxurious-looking, and it’s easy to envision being right there, surrounded on [...]
Honey Locust in the suburbs
Posted in Deb's posts, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged Plants, trees on September 26, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Well, this town outside of Boston can’t be considered ‘the country’ these days, but still, there’s plenty of room for a tree to grow. This Gleditsia, unlike the two in the previous post, has plenty of room to grow, and shows what form and size a Honey Locust really wants to take: