English Gardenscapes with Shades of Roman Britain Tour Note 4: Hever and Sudeley Castles and Gardens
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 …
six on Saturday, 16 March 2024
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 …
six on Saturday, 9 March 2024
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 …
Wordless Wednesday, 6 March 2024
six on Saturday, 2 March 2024
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 …
English Gardenscapes with Shades of Roman Britain Tour Note 3: Mamucium, Chedworth, Chesters, and Hadrian’s Wall
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 …
English Gardenscapes with Shades of Roman Britain Tour Note 2: Rousham
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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my Monday, 8 January 2024
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 …
After Eden 