Zürich (Kreis 9) An interesting article on the importance of native plants for wildlife. The logic is obvious – animals need energy, and they derive it all ultimately from plants, and they have evolved with certain plants and need them – no bamboo, no pandas. No eucalyptus, no koalas. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence as well. It’s […]
Tag Archives: gardening
Gardening Anguish.
09-Jun-11St Kitts & Nevis Over Memorial Day weekend – which was dry – I got a good deal of my garden planted; and since that time we have not had a single drop of rain. I’ve been planning to put in a good cistern system this year, but May was both very busy and exceptionally rainy, and it got […]
Digging with Bears.
26-May-11A friend gave me some offsets from her bottlebrush buckeye plant, but not knowing quite where to put it – they get very large – I stashed the plants in my vegetable garden, which had not been planted. The time has come to plant vegetables, so I chose some spots for the buckeyes and transplanted […]
Bear Gardening.
11-Aug-10We were landscaping this week in Silver Hollow – a beautiful part of the Catskills, one I’ve known for awhile. Today as I was finishing up – my colleague had just pulled out – I heard some weird chattering in the woods, almost like laughter, and the breaking of a large branch, which then came […]
Cloisters.
08-Aug-10I spent Saturday at the Cloisters, and achieved one of my goals of measuring the cloistered gardens there. I was informed by the guard that the reconstructed gardens do not represent the original dimensions, but that was really no concern to me: what impressed me is that each one of the cloisters works as a […]
On Native Plant Gardening.
07-Aug-10Not long ago, when advising some friends who were about to start a garden, I told them to plant a state-of-the-art garden, meaning not a technologically complex one, but rather one in accord with the best knowledge we have of what constitutes excellence in a home garden. This can be expressed on the smallest levels […]
In a city, where do you get your manure?
04-Mar-10An interesting post from Jacob Morrow on urban farming: Two sections of these books particular caught my attention. One (from The Winter Harvest Handbook) is about the tradition of small, but intensely cultivated, market gardens, which were commonplace in nineteenth-century Paris, although they all but disappeared in the twentieth century. This type of gardening (la culture maraicher), […]