...but maybe it's even cooler. This is the glasshouse at Carmarthenshire in Wales. I'm not generally a fan of modern architecture, but the way Foster's glasshouse looks like a digital version of a hill is pretty awesome. I don't know if I need to visit, though; they evidently use it to showcase plants from hot dry climates--like here, for instance ( Read more... )

Gardens are like children; people always compliment them even if they're a little weedy and peaked looking. But when someone comes to visit your garden on purpose to take pictures of it...well, that is a lovely thing. It makes one feel like EITHER the garden is actually looking rather nice OR at least it seems like it does from the immodest ( Read more... )

Three days of distraction (dealing with carpet replacement) led to this:


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I've decided that this will be the summer of zucchini*** soup. There's plenty of squash, and I'm pretty much the only consumer, so I will make a virtue of necessity and discover the best zucchini soup recipe in the universe ( Read more... )

From time to time, I read a comment in a gardening book suggesting that this or that is 'too common' to plant according to some gardening experts. For a while, I thought this was garden variety snobbery, but now I think that perhaps it comes instead from a concern that if we all plant the same things, our gardens will all look the same. However, ( Read more... )

As usual, many things could be done but what I have been doing is working on the front porch. This is before:


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When I think of Peru, I think of the lush green slopes around Machu Picchu, and about half of Peru is green and tropical (the Urubamba, which flows past Machu Picchu, eventually ends up in the Amazon). The other half of Peru is much drier, especially at very high altitudes, above the tree line, where only native grasses can survive. Although this ( Read more... )

... there is an art to doing a photo essay on a garden.  Ideally, the reader finishes with a sense of knowing what the garden looks like. Not just what some of the plants look like, or what a couple of bits of it look like but what the whole of it looks like. Perhaps, if the photo essay is very in-depth the reader may know what the garden looks ( Read more... )

'June gloom' included a bit of rain last night. You just have to live in LA to understand how wrong this is. But it makes the aeonium pretty:


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So mark one of the fountain failed due to (hypothetical) raccoons. Mark two is much shallower, and has so far collected no chicken bones, so that's a success. But that leaves us with the container for the first fountain. It was fairly expensive (for me), and now it's collecting dry leaves and taking up space being an costly boondoggle. "But" I said ( Read more... )