Lately I am fixated on what spring sounds like. Spring is such an amazing season–with all the rain we have been getting it sometimes seems as if I can watch things grow and bloom, it’s all happening so fast. But what’s even more interesting is what I can hear (and sadly, what I no longer hear). When I first moved to my house, I was regularly able to hear the “spring peepers,” a type of woodland frog native to the eastern United States. Its chorus is one of the earliest spring sounds, and it almost sounds like a chorus of spring crickets, if you have never heard them. Apparently, we have oblite ..read more

You might have heard about the earthquake in the northeast on Friday–magnitude 4.8 with an epicenter in New Jersey. I felt the first quake Friday morning because I was at work. My computer monitor was shaking back and forth for a few seconds. Very interesting. When I got home, however, this is what I saw. The tree men were still working and the noise was horrendous. Needless to say, the only ” aftershocks ” that I have felt were huge tree trunks plummeting to the ground. The tree work continued all day Saturday as well until all the white pine trees were gone. This is my yard. At one time, t ..read more

Today is the first day of meteorological winter. As our weather goes, it’s actually one of the warmer mornings that we have had–it’s in the low 30s, and it might reach 50 this afternoon–so a nice early December day. I was thinking, as I was driving yesterday–on my incredibly long 2.5 mile commute, I might add–how much I can actually see now that the leaves have fallen from the trees. Actually, what started me pondering was the leaves still on the trees. I was stopped at a light and there was a big oak with most of its leaves still hanging on for dear life. So I started thinking about that, an ..read more

This is something that is easy and common to do: you see webbing on your plants, like the webbing between the two stalks of this bird of paradise plant and you immediately think, uh-oh! Spider mites! Why wouldn’t you think that? There’s webs on the plant! What’s just impossible to see, even though I tried several different ways to get its photo, is that in the middle of all this webbing is just an ordinary tiny spider. It’s just the same dark color of the soil so there wasn’t a way to make it show up anywhere. But every time I water, it runs down the web, convinced something good has happened ..read more

I have been talking about “leaving the leaves” in my gardens for decades–far longer than it has been fashionable to do so. I am not trying to tell you that I was a sustainability savant. I just have a heavily wooded acre and leaf mulch seemed to be the expedient way to mulch my gardens. It was here, it was oh so plentiful and best of all, it was free. I had more than I could ever use every year. When I talk about more than I could ever use–this is what’s in front of my house as I type this post, awaiting town pickup. The town will compost it. And at this point, only 60% of our leaves are dow ..read more

The Autumn equinox is tomorrow at 2:49 a.m. EDT so it seemed appropriate to post a few fall photos. Unfortunately I don’t think that the leaves are going to be as nice this year as in other years. It’s been a year of record moisture so they seem to have these fungal splotches. But honestly, after all the rain and flooding, I think most of us feel that way. I just shudder to think about what winter will be like if it stays like this. Three inches of rain in a hour is one thing. That would translate to a minimum of 9″ of snow–in an hour! I can’t imagine anything like that and I hope I never se ..read more

Whenever I lecture about houseplants (and so far for the 2023-2024 lecture season, I have 3 house plant lectures scheduled) I am inevitably asked about bringing bugs back into the house with my houseplants. Yes, an occasional bug will come in–but it’s not the bugs people think about when they ask. They are asking me about the traditional things like spider mites, scale, thrips, aphids–those kinds of bugs. Those are exactly the kinds of bugs I put my plants outside to get rid of! What might occasionally hitch hike inside is a spider or two, a cricket, a katydid. In fact, my grand total for las ..read more

At long last, the goldenrod (solidago) is blooming so the Spoiler can stop asking me if the green patch right in front of our property is ” a bunch of weeds.” All of the native plants in this garden have been planted by nature (most likely by birds) so I am grateful for the help but I don’t know particular species. You might find it odd that I refer to mid-August as “late summer. ” Here in New England, our first frost is anywhere from late September to early October historically, so we have, perhaps, only 4-6 weeks of growing left. Some years we have much more but that’s just borrowed time. S ..read more

This is meadow hawkweed. As you can see by the fact that it is growing between the cracks in my slate paver walkway, by definition right there, it is in the wrong place! My walkway is definitely not a meadow! But aside from that fact, why am I tolerating this weedy thing that brushes you in the ankles every time you pass by? Of course it’s all about the pollinators. At first, I was just curious. I hadn’t seen this weed/wildflower before and when it sent up its first stalk, I had to see what was going to happen. Of course, the first stalk opened, the tiny little bees came and that was that. It ..read more

This is a hydrangea arborescens, or a smooth hydrangea. It is Invincibelle Mini Mauvette, so one of the smaller varieties of those arborescens hydrangeas that Proven Winners has been hybridizing. It’s a wonderful plant–it starts blooming in late June and it continues almost into mid-August. But better yet, the bees love it! I was out picking some flowers over the weekend and there were honeybees, the big, fat, bumblebees and tiny little bees all over it–and none of the bees minded my clumsy attempts to cut the thing back and harvest a few of these lovely flowers for my house. Recently, I read ..read more