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, …
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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 …
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1. I'm beginning my six this week with a photo that announces what makes all the others worthwhile, viable even---rain! This photo was taken of a Gerbera daisy that was nearly dead due to lack of appreciable rain for over a month, but powered through with one healthy flower. 2. Another plant flowering now is …
After Eden 