23/03/2011 - 22:39:26
Posted By: Paula Panich
The mists of early morning over the meadows of Whately dissipate under a surprisingly warm spring sun. In the patchwork landscape, the chartreuse of late-April willows is punctuated by the occasional pink-and-white “cup and saucer” magnolia, three-quarters of its way into full bloom. Although it is just before eight o’clock, there’s a strong impression that [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
Bare branches, silvered by snow, then honeyed by warm afternoon light — the Williamsburg-South Ashfield Road in western Massachusetts, with its gabled farmhouses and snow-drifted fields, looked for all the world, on this late January day, like New England’s dream of itself. I was on my way to Maple Ridge Peony Farm, in Conway, and [...]
22/03/2011 - 23:46:03
Posted By: Paula Panich
Insistence on individualism in the West is never so strident as in shaping thought about art. In garden design, as in landscape architecture, personalities and signatures are writ large, literally and figuratively — think of Le Notre in France; William Kent in England; Fletcher Steele or Frederick Law Olmsted in the United States. The [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
A Book Review by Paula Panich Yard Full of Sun: The Story of a Gardener’s Obsession That Got a Little Out of Hand by Scott Calhoun Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2005 (www.rionuevo.com) Lavishly illustrated with gorgeous photographs $22.95 Buy this book. Read this book. Read it even if you live in USDA Zone 3, 4, [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
For many lovers of American gardens, the landscape architect Fletcher Steele is their Gershwin and the famous Blue Steps at Naumkeag are his rhapsody. Happily, the landscape historian Robin Karson’s 1989 fascinating and out-of-print book, Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect: An Account of the Gardenmaker’s Life, 1885-1971, is available in a revised and handsome paperbound edition [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
by Paula Panich After five years in the Northeast, I’m still on the lookout for plants that will remind me of the desert, where I lived for many years. I first saw several low, tufted blue fescue grasses in a friend’s garden on a hillside near Cummington, Massachusetts a couple of years ago; I’m afraid [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
by Paula Panich Four hundred years ago, almost to the moment, the English botanist and barber-surgeon John Gerarde was cataloguing the plants in his garden. In a corner he saw a dogwood, and mused over its many names – “Hounds tree, Hounds berry, Dogs berry tree, Pricke-timber . . . Gater tree.” But what could [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
The Yak Tea and Blue Poppies Frank Kingdon Ward (1885-1958) breathed his last in a dull English pub, an unfitting end for the dashing plant explorer who trekked through Tibet, China, and Southeast Asia. Beginning in 1911, the diligent, savvy traveler collected 23,000 specimen plants in the course of his 24 long and dangerous expeditions [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
Pioneers of American Landscape Design Charles Birnbaum and Robin Karson, editors McGraw-Hill, 2000 486 pages, well illustrated $59.95 In Camden, Maine in years past, I often sat in an amphitheater behind the Camden Public Library. I would watch my child play there, or we would watch a theater performance for children together all the while [...]
12/03/2011 - 04:58:00
Posted By: Paula Panich
Robert Irwin’s azalea maze is abloom. It never ceases to amaze. This is its moment.
