My Virtual Maryland Garden

Some of the colchicums and sternbergias are in full bloom now. Their colors don't do much for one another, but this old planting has giv...

Aster 'Bluebird' is a butterfly magnet. In fact, several sorts of nectar feeders are swarming the flowers today. The butterflies a...

My introduction to asters came about thirty years ago when my mother and I, returning home from the grocery store, slowed down to admire a f...

The plant in the illustration is Aster laevis 'Blue Bird' (aka Symphyotrichum laeve 'Blue Bird'), a current favorite amon...

The grape soda factory exploded recently. When I take Biscuit for a walk we pass a spot where I begin to notice it: the pervasive scent of g...

The plant in the image above is Barnardia , long a resident of our gardens and for just about as long neglected. This name Barnardia is n...

The plant in the image above is Colchicum variegatum . This is almost certainly the same plant described in the early seventeenth century b...

For local gardeners, the genus Gentiana divides neatly into two groups: the ones we want and can't grow and all the rest. OK, it's n...

It certainly is sweet, but it doesn't bloom in the autumn: how about sweet late summer clematis? What induces flowering in this plant? A...

I have no desire to be out in the garden during July and August. Outdoor gardening during those months for me consists of two things mostly:...

The patch of white at the top of this image is a group of flowers of the rose ' Darlow's Enigma'. Some of you are perhaps thin...

The weather has been very agreeable lately, and that means meals out on the deck. This morning it was cool until the sun came over the trees...

The little guys shown above in their Halloween colors are milkweed bugs. And yes, they are true bugs. The photo was taken last year in Octo...

The realization that Salvia guaranitica is hardy in our gardens was a great day for me. Among easily grown garden plants there is nothing ...

So far, this does not seem to be turning out to be a great year for monarch butterflies locally. I've seen two or three adults, but so f...

The vesper iris, Iris dichotoma is blooming now. Traditionally it was thought of as the last of the irises to bloom, although the widesprea...

The amazing creature above is a barred owl. This one was captured as an injured bird and nursed back to comparatively good health. It's...

It amuses me that so many people seem to think of gardeners as reserved, dignified slow- laners . Botany in the mid-eighteenth century, impr...

As far as I’m concerned, a garden isn ’t much of a garden without snakes. The first garden had snakes, so why shouldn ’t ours, too? Of cours...

I think I stumbled on a useful word the other day. I had to make it up, but since I did that in the conventional way, it would not surprise ...