Our new front porch! Greetings! It's been a busy fall and I'm only now able to post about the three projects I've been working on this autumn (now that winter is pretty much here!).  But I wanted to post one last time before winter. Here's what I've been doing: 1. Plant Moving In September I did my first project: moving plants out of my long Rainbow Border, which I'm eliminating, as I mentioned in my post earlier this year. I planted many of these in front of the addition on the west side of our house. Going, going.... The Rainbow Border didn't look too bad this ye ..read more

  Greetings to my fellow gardeners. I just don't know where the summer went! Apparently the last time I posted here was back in May.... But I recently had a chance to take a few snapshots of my gardens right before dusk (which arrives much earlier now). In May, I was working on my new garden area, which I've been calling the Triangle Garden, or sometimes the Diagonal Garden: The Triangle/Diagonal Garden back in May before planting As you can see in the top photo, the new garden has come along well since then. I planted three groups of stripey cannas in each bed, as well as a c ..read more

  Greetings! I'd like to share with you my new garden project, which I've been thinking about doing for some time now. (I apologize for the long post.) I've noticed for some years now that I enjoy the gardens that are closer to my house much more than those areas that are farther away or located in places where I rarely see them. This makes sense, of course, and not just because I'm able to enjoy them more often because they're closer. Also, I remember to maintain them, which is much easier when they're right outside my door, and so they are more successful garden areas -- which are mu ..read more

  Greetings after a long winter! Somehow it's already May, and it seems like most of Spring has snuck by me. There were some nice days in April, but also some stretches of cold, wet, windy days, so I've done very little in my gardens until recently. But it certainly seems like I've been busy all winter -- a quick update on what I've been up to:  My retail store was destroyed in early October, and finding and remodeling a new space, re-ordering all the inventory and furnishings, and getting going again was incredibly time-consuming through February (I'm still dealing with the insur ..read more

Greetings! Readers of my blog have probably noticed that I have many, many boxwood shrubs -- several hundred -- in my various garden areas. The most prominent boxwood planting is my Herb Garden, shown above in a photo taken three years ago. (This is one of my favorite pictures of my garden, because it shows my white picket fence, the formal Herb Garden, and the Iowa farm scenery beyond -- I feel the photo really captures the feeling of my gardens and their setting.) The Herb Garden was the first garden area I made when we moved out here in 2008. I had wanted to make a formal garden area f ..read more

  Greetings! Last weekend my husband, children and I visited my mother in Ames, Iowa, seeing her for the first time in nearly a year and a half. Now that she and most of my family have been fully vaccinated, she was eager to see us again after such a lonely Covid year spent completely by herself. It was so wonderful to finally see her in person again. While in Ames, I wanted to visit a peony collector there whom I've been corresponding with via email for the past few months, and I thought that my mother, a retired botanist, might also enjoy a visit to a beautiful garden owned by a fell ..read more

  Greetings! It's been a beautiful May here in Iowa. Last week was quite warm, but this week the nights have been unusually cool for this time of year, dipping down into the low 40s, and even frost last night -- definitely not time yet to plant out the tomatoes, pepper, zinnias and dahlia starts that are becoming so large in my sunroom that I'm starting to run out of room. But I think that might have been our last frost, and I hope that the nighttime temps will soon warm up a bit, so I can start moving things out of the sunroom for the summer and planting the Tropical Garden aroun ..read more

  Happy Springtime, everyone! It's so lovely to have sunny days and springtime flowers again -- it's one of the most beautiful and cheerful times of the year. And after a cold winter spent away from loved ones over the holidays, it's doubly nice to be able to be outside again as Covid vaccination progress is allowing more Americans to venture forth from their homes again. Here are a few pictures of what's been going on in my gardens: The big project my family and I finally tacked last weekend was scraping and painting the white picket fence around our house. We hadn't done this for six ..read more

  Hello, everyone! I'm sorry I haven't posted since August -- I meant to write a post in September, which was such a beautiful month in my gardens this month, but somehow that didn't happen. I'll show a few pictures from September and October in this post. Tropical Garden First are a few images of the tropical garden I planted around my patio for the first time this year. As you might recall, this is what it looked like back in mid-May, right after I planted all the tiny annuals and tropical plants: Before: After: If there's one thing tropical plants are known for, it's fast gr ..read more

Hello everyone. I hope any of you who live in the Midwest are recovering from Monday's windstorm, and have electric power restored. We were quite fortunate: we didn't have much wind damage, and we lost power for only half an hour or so. We're just on the south edge of where the storm damage was worst -- only 10 miles or so north of us, people lost multiple trees and were without power for days (some areas still don't have electricity). As you can see from the picture above, part of our old pear tree split off. Here's a few more pictures of that: It looks like a pretty bad split ..read more