In Maine, we are on the downhill side of winter, more than halfway from the winter solstice to the spring equinox. Days are getting longer, and the higher angle of the sun, combined with temperatures above freezing on many days, is melting snow. I can see bare ground under trees and along the foundation of the house, where some new shoots of green are visible. Despite these hints of spring to come, it will be about six weeks until the first flowers bloom out in the garden. This is a time of year, when winter is getting old and I am eager for spring, that I particularly welcome the warm colors ..read more

The only fall clean-up I do in my garden involves bringing in garden furniture, hoses, and plant supports for the winter. I prefer to leave plant seed heads as food and spent plant stems and leaves as habitat. Admittedly, all this plant debris can look pretty messy, especially to the eyes of those who prefer a neat garden. But messiness brings its own pleasures. After weeks of weirdly warm and wet weather, it finally turned seasonably cold and snowy in the second half of January. One morning, I looked out my big bedroom window to see a few dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) feeding in the front ..read more

When I created the serenity garden a dozen years ago in a tucked away space at the edge of the woods, I imagined it as a quiet, secluded, calming retreat. This was my first woodland planting, and I eagerly consulted my garden reference books, choosing just the right plants for this special place. I chronicled the vision, planning, and creation of this garden here, here, and here. This is the original plan for this planting. From the beginning, this planting never lived up to either my vision or its name. It turned out that the combination of my native sandy soil and the competition for moistu ..read more

In this weirdly wet summer, it seems as though we hardly had any real summer weather, and, suddenly, I can feel the approach of autumn. In the woodland border, the foliage of our native columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, has turned to red and the Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) is in bloom. Nevertheless, summer is not over in the garden. In mid-August, there are still about twenty varieties of daylilies with flowers – but most of these have only a few buds left to open. One exception is the aptly named ‘Autumn Minaret,’ with its delicate flowers that float high above the foliage ..read more

In Maine, our rainy weather has continued into July, although with more dry days, heat and sunshine than we experienced in June. Shade-tolerant, moisture-loving plants like astilbes have grown exceptionally well in this weather. In the deck border, Astilbe x thumbergii ‘Betsy Cuperus’ has more flowers than it has ever had in the more than twenty years since I planted it, and the tall Astilbe x thumbergii ‘Moerheim’s Glory’ is putting on a lush display by the front porch. Many sun-loving plants, like lavender and coreopsis, are blooming happily, seemingly unfazed by the weather ..read more

Maine has been having an exceptionally wet summer, stuck under upper-level low pressure areas that have kept us mostly cool, wet, and gray. It’s not that we have had an exceptional amount of rain; more that we have seen exceptionally  little sunshine. In the month of June (usually a lovely month of blue skies, sunshine, soft breezes and temperatures in the seventies), it rained all but a handful of days. Despite the dearth of sunshine, however, the garden has made the transition from spring to summer. Daylilies, the quintessential high summer flowers in my garden, have begun to bloom, and ..read more

June has been cool and rainy in Maine; but, despite the cool temperatures and scarcity of sunshine, the garden has been inching into summer. Little by little, spring flowers have faded, and early summer flowers have begun to bloom. By the patio, the roses seem to have benefitted from this cool, wet weather and are particularly lush this year. In this part of the garden, the number of self-sown spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana) plants seems larger than usual this year. I dig these plants up when they seed themselves in inconvenient places, but I like to let them bloom before I decide ..read more

May is a month of dramatic transitions in my Maine garden. As the month began, the garden was in its early spring phase. The primary display was provided by daffodils on the front slope, with backup from some hyacinths in the blue and yellow border and Forsythia shrubs outside my study window. The first of the spring wildflowers to bloom in my garden, bluets (Houstonia caerulea), were just beginning to open their flowers. By the middle of May, native spring wildflowers were stealing the show both in and out of the garden. The ground was now covered with carpets of bluets, and moss phlox (Phlo ..read more

I never get tired of the miracle that is spring. It begins with the lengthening days that tell us that spring is on its way, even as the snow continues to pile up on the ground. Then, as snow begins to melt around the foundation of the house and in the garden, new growth appears and crocuses splash their vibrant colors around a landscape that has come to seem drab and dreary. By early April, enough snow has melted that I can resume my “morning tour of the garden,” a ritual of taking my first mug of tea out with me as I walk slowly through the garden to see what is happening – and at this time ..read more

This past week, we had a string of unseasonably warm and sunny days, with temperatures rising through the sixties and seventies, and my Maine garden was catapulted into spring. All the snow in the garden has disappeared (although there is still a remnant of the big snow bank where the plow piled up snow at the top of the driveway), and I have been able to get to work on spring clean-up. In the warmth, spring bulbs suddenly popped into bloom, and I scrambled to clean up the old plant debris from the side slope to make the crocuses visible there. In the back garden, the hyacinths ope ..read more