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 …
Depending on an on-time arrival in Manchester, our English garden and villa tour will begin appropriately with the Mamucium Roman Fort and Gardens Reconstruction. The key word here, however, is reconstruction. It is a site I am not familiar with, so I’ll simply note that Manucium, now a part of an Urban Historical Park, dates …
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 …
(This series is written specifically to provide background information for folks traveling with me and my colleague Samuel Pezzillo to visit gardens and Roman sites in England in June 2024 . Others interested are certainly welcomed to read along with us.) An overview of decorative gardens in Britain can begin with Roman villa gardens bordered …
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 