From the Romans to the Tudors for this next set of notes, but I'll return to the Romans in Bath for the next installment. This post, though, includes castles and gardens related to two wives of Henry VIII. We chose these sites in part for their historical connections but in large because there are features …
The wildflowers are coming up! Six of the most prolific here in the garden at Highland Lake, Alabama, are my subjects this week. 1. The first is my favorite---rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides ), a native, woodland perennial. Wonderfully delicate, and really rather tiny, it is easily overlooked among winter's left-over leaves and pine needles. To illustrate …
1. I'll begin this week's six, which is mostly images, with one of those shrubs that typically announces the beginning of spring: forsythia. There are several forsythia bushes throughout the garden, but none of them blooming quite so vigorously as they have in the past. 2. The Lenten Roses or hellebores (Helleborus spp.), too, are …
I realized today as I sat down to post a quick Six on Saturday that I haven't posted one in 2024! My focus has been on writing a series of guides for a tour of English gardens and Roman sites I'm leading with a colleague in June. Also, the weather here in Blount County Alabama …
Of all the lovely landscape gardens one can visit in England, we settled on Rousham for two primary reasons: it remains essentially unchanged in its 18th-century house and landscape design by William Kent, and it is of a scale more easily comprehended than Stowe (250 acres) or Chatsworth (150 acres). In its 25 acres, though, …
Continue reading "English Gardenscapes with Shades of Roman Britain Tour Note 2: Rousham"
Frost Flower Frost flowers, or ice flowers, can form on dried stems of plants with still viable root systems when temperatures are freezing, but the ground is not. Moisture can be drawn up through the roots, then push through the desiccated stems as it freezes in the cold air. This "flower" formed on a dried and broken …
There is not a lot of color, much less flash, in today's six. But there is a lot of hope because the focus is on flourishing of plants that suffered badly in the uncharacteristically cold and unusually sustained Alabama temperatures last December and March.  1. First comes three small native anise plants (Illicium Parviflorum) that started …
After Eden 