Archive for the Growing Together Category

Well, we did it! Last week we held the first event of our book tour with a talk at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. There may be no better place to get inspired for the road ahead. Display gardens at big shows always have an idea or two that can be incorporated into small gardens and home landscaping. Vendors always have enough stuff to

David and I are wandering the Northwest Flower and Garden Show this week, and giving a talk on Sunday (February 7, 2010). The display gardens are beautiful, as always. Some are even spectacular.  But only two garden installations serve to truly inspire an urban gardener in these times. Since David and I are particularly interested in sustainable, organic food production for urban dwellers we found

I am immersed these days in the language of botany. It is just as though I have signed up for one of those immersion programs used to learn a foreign language. Which I guess is what I am really doing, after all. I had Latin in high-school, but can’t remember much of that.  But David knows the language well.  And in the classes we teach

Our fingers are stiff with cold. It is winter here in the Northwest. David picks up his end of the measuring tape, and a hundred feet away, I pick up mine. We walk ten feet downslope and lay the tape on the ground again. Steamy clouds of our breath hang in the air. Dry leaves and twigs crunch underfoot. David turns on his recorder and

Today is Christmas day and I thought I’d share with you a few photos of some of my favorite native plants of the Northwest. All of the plants featured here are evergreen shrubs or trees. All of them produce berries that attract birds to your garden. All the fruits are edible by us humans too and are quite tasty. David and I went out for

White puffs of breath hang in the cold air. Snow dusts our heads and shoulders as we brush back the limbs of conifers that crowd the trail. David and I hike the Larch Mountain Trail near the Columbia River, east of Portland. We’re not going far on this wintry day, hoping only to catch a glimpse of noble fir, Abies procera, in its native habitat.

When I was a kid my mother grew an enormous poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) in a dormer window in my bedroom. She had received it one Christmas as a small potted plant to decorate the dinner table. We always gathered as a very large extended “family” that included close friends of my parents and their children. My siblings and I are still friends with the children

Orchid Obsession David has turned his attention to the tropical plants that live in our houses, in particular one of his true loves – orchids. My first day in Hawaii, many years ago, was filled with orchids. I had stopped to visit David on my way from Australia where I had been leading an eco-tour of the Great Barrier Reef. He lived in a tiny

At this time of year David and I put the garden to bed. He writes about keeping it healthy for next season, and concentrates on sanitizing – cleaning out unhealthy plant tissue where disease may lurk until spring. For me the garden season is over. In our cold climate, I find myself more and more reluctant to go outdoors, much less garden. It’s time to

David’s blog told us about composting – such a useful pastime in the winter months. It keeps us active in the garden, provides us with a valuable asset come spring, and allows us to participate in the earth’s life cycles even while the garden lies dormant. I don’t know about you, but I thought I’d like to read about soil. I loved playing in the