George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Three Bulb Lessons from Keukenhof

May 10th, 2022

   The lackluster color we see (or don’t see at all) in so many yards up to this point in the growing season is largely because we’re under-bulbed.

The Netherlands’ Keukenhof garden gets a lot of color impact by planting bulbs in big masses.

   Spring blooming bulbs like tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths are the leading way to color our spring landscapes, but the majority of yards I see are totally bulbless.

   Public gardens like Hershey Gardens and Longwood and especially The Netherlands’ Keukenhof garden show us what’s possible with spring bulbs.

   I got to see Keukenhof’s 79 acres of bulbs in full glory last month – twice – as part of a pair of European tours I hosted through Lowee’s group tours and Collette vacations.

See a photo gallery of 25 pictures from the 2022 Keukenhof gardens display

  While we can’t come close to what Keukenhof does with its 7 million bulbs, the garden does offer us three key lessons on how we can at least beef up our own bulb acumen.

   Here they are:

   Plant more… and cluster them. A pack of 10 tulips lined up single-file across the house front doesn’t add up to much impact.

Prime Time to Garden-Gawk

May 3rd, 2022

   Any day is a good day to be in a garden so far as I’m concerned, but for “normal” people, there’s no better time than the next few weeks.

The meadow garden at one of my favorite public gardens, Chanticleer.

   May’s weather is usually warm but not yet into hot, and so much of the plant world here has decided that late spring is the ideal time to unfurl, flower, and perfume.

   In other words, there’s a lot to see, and it’s a comfortable time to be out there seeing it.

   No wonder the Chester County-based American Public Gardens Association decided to make the second week of May the time frame for its annual “Go Public Gardens Days” celebration.

   This year, the initiative runs May 6 through 15. Many public gardens use the occasion to run special events or offer special admissions, so it’s worth poking around at places you’ve been thinking about seeing.

   One example is in our own backyard where Hershey Gardens is offering half-priced admission this Friday, May 6, for Go Public Gardens day. Vouchers are available on the Gardens website. (Moms also get in free this Saturday and Sunday in honor of Mother’s Day. Dads get in free June 19 for Father’s Day.)

   APGA makes it easy to find gardens by publishing a map of its members on its website. It’ll show you what’s within 150 miles of your home or let you search out and link to gardens anywhere in the U.S. if you like to include garden visits in your vacation plans.

    You can also find out about Go Public Gardens Days events by going to @PublicGardens on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or by going to @AmericanPublicGardens on Instagram.

   Another good resource for planning trips to gardens within day-trip range of Harrisburg is America’s Garden Capital, an umbrella group for 38 public gardens in the Philadelphia region. That cluster represents the most gardens in any one region in America.

Stoneleigh in Villanova is one of the region’s newest public gardens.

   The group offers a free America’s Garden Capital Passport that includes descriptions and contact information on the 38 gardens, which includes such well known ones as Longwood, Chanticleer, Morris Arboretum, and Winterthur but also smaller gems such as Philadelphia’s Shofuso Japanese garden, Temple’s Ambler Arboretum, Jenkins Arboretum, and Stoneleigh.

   If you need some help zeroing in on the best of the best gardens worth seeing, I wrote an e-book last year called “50 American Public Gardens You Really Ought to See.” It’s a $7.95 download on my Buy Helpful Info page.

   The 62-page e-book features one-page profiles of my 50 favorite U.S. public gardens – in order. It includes overviews and highlights of each garden, location and contact information, two photos of each garden, and a “George’s Take” on what stands out most to me at each place.

   If you like to visit gardens with fellow garden-gawkers, Lowee’s Group Tours and I run trips every year to great gardens all over the U.S. and even overseas. Some are one-day coach tours; others are multi-day garden-themed vacations.

   The list for the rest of 2022 is on my George’s Talks and Trips page.

   One other thing I should mention is the American Horticultural Society’s Reciprocal Admissions Program. This is an amazing bargain in which participating gardens let you in free if you’re a member of any one of them or a member of AHS.

   And this is anytime, not just during Go Public Gardens Days.

A Garden Sanctuary

April 26th, 2022

   Soon after my daughter – then a junior in high school – left for a year-long exchange program living in the Netherlands, I found myself spending a lot of time in a particular corner of my back yard.

This was my early garden sanctuary view from a swing under a big black-cherry tree.

   I’d go back to this shaded far corner under a wild black cherry tree and think about what Erin might be doing… counting the days until her return, and above all else, praying that she was safe. (It’s what worry-wart dads do.)

   A few years later, when my trigeminal neuralgia face pain returned, I again found myself heading back to that little corner. I’d try to figure out what I was going to do next while attempting to distract the pain with the sound of my water garden.

   I purposely built a garden back there as a get-away – a place mainly to enjoy some quiet time away from the phone and computer.

   What I didn’t realize is that this space had become my garden sanctuary.

   That phrase didn’t ring a bell until I read a blog post last month by a western-Canada Master Gardener and author named Stephanie Rose.

   Stephanie runs an amazing website and blog called “Garden Therapy” that bloomed in the aftermath of her nine-year-long bout with severe headaches and crippling fatigue.

   Her coping efforts mirrored mine as she discovered how healing that one, special, tiny space of nature can be.

   “I would argue there isn’t a better recovery program in the world!” she writes of her garden sanctuary.

   For Stephanie, her space was a hammock chair under a deck, surrounded by flowers and plants.

   “Whenever I needed a moment outside but didn’t have the energy, I could sit and sway in the chair and still be among the plants,” she says. “Without my garden, I don’t even want to know what I would have done while dealing with my debilitating illness.”

   Stephanie found out first-hand what a trove of medical research has substantiated – that gardens can be therapeutic places.

   I think lots of others have figured that out, too, lately. After two years of COVID hideout, so many people have mentioned their gardens as tranquil retreats of peace, fresh air, and sanity.

The Three Waves of Veggie Gardening

April 19th, 2022

   One of the keys in Nicole Burke’s “Kitchen Garden Revival” strategy is grouping different vegetables into their plant families.

This patch is a “Wave-1” planting.

   Nicole says that when she first started gardening, like so many other beginners, she was overwhelmed at the thought of how to grow the many different plants.

   Her “ah-ha” moment came when she realized that botanists long ago grouped plants into families by their similar traits and growing habits.

   Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, and kohlrabi all fall into the brassica family, for example, while cucumbers, squash, zucchini, pumpkins, and gourds are sisters in the cucurbit family.

   “Instead of having to understand each and every plant on the seed shelf or every plant at the garden center,” Nicole said in a Great Grow Along webinar on her strategy, “you really only need to master a handful of plant families. Once you do, each time you want to grow something new, you simply find out which plant family it belongs in, and boom, you know almost immediately what season that plant likes to grow in and how well it’s likely to grow.”

   Nicole’s “Kitchen Garden Revival” book and her Kitchen Garden Academy online courses go into a lot more detail if this approach sounds interesting to you.

   I agree that anything we can do to simplify vegetable gardening will help beginners and encourage them to stick with it.

   The strategy that I gravitated to long ago was grouping plants by when they’re best planted.

   That boils down to just two basic groups – 1.) ones that grow best in cool weather and that can survive frost, and 2.) ones that grow best in warm weather and that will croak if hit by frost.

Where the Sidewalks Are Carpeted with Flowers

April 12th, 2022

   Once a year in May, the plant-loving residents of the Portuguese island of Madeira go wild with flowers and stage an event called the Madeira Flower Festival, which features flower-filled parade floats and sidewalks that are carpeted with cut blooms.

One famous scene from Madeira.

   It’s a great place for any flower-lover to be on a warm spring day.

   Lowee’s Group Tours and I thought local gardeners would relish a chance to see this festival first-hand, so we’re planning a trip next year (2023) to Portugal that includes a full day at the 2023 Madeira Flower Festival.

   The 13-day trip, operated by Collette Vacations, will run April 29 through May 11, 2023, and take us to the warm breezes and lush landscapes of Lisbon, the Azorean “green island” of St. Michael, and three days on the island of Madeira.

   We start the trip with a flight from Washington’s Dulles airport into Lisbon and spend the first three days discovering Portugal’s capital. Highlights there include sampling Portuguese food and wine, touring historic sites such as the Jeronimos Monastery and Tower of Belem, and traveling to Sintra and the gorgeous Estoril coast on the Riviera, a longtime favorite get-away of Portuguese kings.

   Then we fly to the Azores and the island of St. Michael for four days, where we’ll see one of the finest gardens in Europe – the Terra Nostra Botanical Park. While on St. Michael (the largest of the nine volcanic islands that make up the Azores), we’ll do a walking tour of Ponta Delgada, feast on a lunch cooked by volcanic heat in the Furnas Valley, tour a tea plantation and a pineapple plantation, see a pair of crater lakes in which one is blue and one is green, and have an option to go on a whale-watching adventure.