“Home & Garden - KVOA 4” plus 4 more |
- Home & Garden - KVOA 4
- Borders reach their zenith - Stuff
- Care for plants during drought - Carroll County Online
- Pocono Home and Garden: Tomato trouble; 828-lb. pumpkin; 180 quilts - Pocono Record
- Bronx features edible garden - Carroll County Online
| Posted: 02 Aug 2009 08:03 PM PDT Featured: 8 ways to recycle that old T-shirt *Top 5 'green' jobs  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Borders reach their zenith - Stuff Posted: 09 Aug 2009 05:10 PM PDT Garden ViewBy ABBIE JURY - Taranaki Daily NewsI wrote two weeks ago about the English summer garden being a continuum stretching from natural meadows through to plantings on the sides of motorways or traffic islands. I was gently drifting my way along this journey until I reached my word limit around the classic English country garden as exemplified by Penelope Hobhouse and the late Rosemary Verey. I had to stop there because, suddenly, there is a great big punctuation point with the late Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter. Great Dixter can be controversial. Mark stood in the garden and commented that it was a bit like an ongoing negotiation with nature. At its best, it is gifted and has clearly had an enormous influence on the direction taken in many New Zealand gardens. In the middle, it can be somewhat serendipitous, but there are parts where there is a suspicion of the emperor's new clothes. As a garden, it sits between the meadow gardening/ wildflower end of the spectrum, which relies on a great deal of self-seeding (and good chance) and the controlled Edwardian Arts and Crafts-style synonymous with Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. Lloyd experimented all his life, but his legacy to modern gardening is arguably the mixed border (using shrubs and clumping perennials in tandem and brave colour combinations) and the managed meadow. In New Zealand, we seized on the mixed border as if it were our own, but alas, it is not often carried out with Lloyd's panache and is frequently rather dull. Historically, Lutyens and Jekyll pre-dated Christo Lloyd and in fact Lutyens redesigned Great Dixter for the Lloyd parents. But on my continuum, they are more to the ordered and managed side. We travelled in part to see their legacy. Famous examples are Sissinghurst and Hestercomb, but we also visited lesser-known gardens. The spirit of the Lutyens-Jekyll style was formal landscaping by Lutyens in the Arts and Crafts mode (confined and defined spaces of the garden room type), softened by sweeping plantings designed by Jekyll. If you imagine beautiful stonework, clipped hedging, masses of blue delphiniums, extravagant fluffy pink peonies, pink and white roses and drifts of underplanting such as lambs' ears (stachys), you will be on the right wavelength. It is very pretty, although the borders and beds could be a bit on the narrow and busy side and it can get a little formulaic when you see a number of such gardens in a row. I suspect that it may be a little dated now. Certainly the very narrow borders worried me and I would want to rip them out. Keep the trademark Lutyens rounded stone steps, though. Nobody does steps like Lutyens. Fortunately, it was towards the end of our trip that we ended up at Wisley, because there we saw a range of garden styles that gave us the framework to make sense of what we had seen. Cue in the classic long border. Yes, Great Dixter has one but Wisley sets the standard. Hyde Hall has a shorter long border divided into colour segments. Lots of gardens have the long border. At its Wisley splendour, it is two parallel borders with a wide grassy path between and we are talking a 130 metres long, each, and (here is the rub for many home gardeners) 6m wide. Beth Chatto's garden is a whole series of free-form borders that curve and flow but are still following the principles of the long border. Such borders are often planted on terrain contoured to give extra height at the back. Because they froth out at the front (alchemilla mollis is a great favourite to achieve this effect and seems to be regarded as colour neutral), there is often a boundary of wide pavers defining the edge. This stops the frothing from killing the grass. Generally, plants are layered from tallest at the back to lowest at the front and the crux of this type of planting is combinations of plant foliage and flower throughout the season. There is no mass planting. Many plants will need staking and deadheading and it is all extremely labour-intensive. You need plenty of space for this type of voluptuous display. For us, this is the zenith of summer gardening. On the days we visited, we ranked Chatto top of the list for plant combinations and quality management of this intensive style of gardening, Hyde Hall top in genuinely original colour and flower combinations and Wisley all-round top in the total package of scale, design, plant combinations and management. But Wisley does not stop at the long borders. Dutch designer Piet Oudolf has moved herbaceous planting on a few steps and, in front of the spectacular new glasshouse, Tom Stuart-Smith has taken it further. There is an element of modern pragmatism and, indeed, we were told that the new borders only require a third of the input of the traditional long borders and that is a huge difference. The Oudolf borders have attracted both praise and criticism. They are a great deal more controlled. The plant palette is restricted and most of the plants chosen do not require staking (or, I think, regular deadheading) and they are pretty much of a standard height. But it is not mass planting and the skill of striking plant combinations remains to the fore. Oudolf has worked with parallel borders again, but used different plant combos in rivers flowing across, more or less in diagonal lines when viewed from above. Each river is comprised of three or four different types of plants. Tom Stuart Smith has further refined the Oudolf technique, bringing it together with the sweeps of colour first espoused by Jekyll and the prairie meadow concept currently in vogue to give grand sweeps of herbaceous plantings for the larger canvas. Much of the detail and complexity of the long borders has now gone, as has the need for intensive maintenance. But plantsmanship and design lifts it well above utility mass planting and while it may not appeal for smaller scale domestic gardens, it is a modern and more practical approach for public plantings. So how do we end up at the traffic islands filled with tussock or the motorway sidings of utility clumpy plants? Take the simpler blocks of colour planting done by Tom Stuart- Smith. Eliminate any plants that are pink-flowered (not fashionable), anything that is deciduous (need foliage 12 months of the year), anything that is grown more for its flowers than its foliage, anything that requires more than a very occasional clean-up. You are left with reliable, utility, evergreen clumping perennials that in recent years have become the repertoire of many landscapers for mass plantings - the liriopes, mondo grass, ligularia type of plant. Now reduce the range further. Take out any plants less than 30cm high, any plants that require good soil conditions or shelter, any plants which look sufficiently desirable to be stolen, and any plants not available dirt cheap and preferably from a native plant supplier or prison nursery. You are left with mostly tough grassy type plants that on their own are as dull as ditchwater. It is the end of the road. Sponsored links This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Care for plants during drought - Carroll County Online Posted: 09 Aug 2009 04:42 PM PDT In Carroll and surrounding counties, the land is parched. If you're a gardener you can probably tell by looking at your own garden which plants are suffering the most. Individual plants respond to drought in various ways. Plants may slow or restrict their growth, wilt or curl up in response to lack of water. Most newly established plants and trees need about an inch or so of water per week; however, those that are established can get by with somewhat less. Some plants, such as grass, become dormant after prolonged periods without water. It's nature's way of protecting the grass. The good news is that grass does grow back, so there's no need to water your lawn during a drought.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Pocono Home and Garden: Tomato trouble; 828-lb. pumpkin; 180 quilts - Pocono Record Posted: 08 Aug 2009 04:57 PM PDT Question of the summer: Why aren't my tomatoes ripening? Here's what you need and here's the forecast for the week. Yes, Monday is going to be a hot one.
Some flowers have been a success. Our Home and Garden blog discusses dahlias, the magical delight of the summer. Here's a secret: if you plant enough, even the slugs can't eat all of them. Some will triumph. More ideas for summer color: gourds, the stunning flowers of the lantana and the big beautiful hydrangea. Here's something to think about for next summer: a $2 seed packet of gourds can result in numerous Christmas gifts. The Great Pumpkin has turned up in Louisiana. Brodie Gonsoulin set out to grow a pumpkin big enough to hold a beer keg at his Halloween party. He must have thought he pounded down a few too many when this 828-pounder grew in his garden. Yes, it's the new state record. He's still searching for the keg pumpkin, though, because they've all ripened much earlier than Halloween.
Speaking of kitchens and bathrooms, here's what you need to know about kitchen sinks and toilet seats.
Or, start with a basic recipe for Squash and Goat Cheese Frittata and use any combination of ingredients you want. One more basic. We tell you how to make no fuss bouillabaisse. No fuss, that's just what we like to hear. Here's a no-fuss tip from the Old Farmer's Almanac. If you're out of balsamic vinegar, use 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar plus 1/2 teaspoon sugar for each tablespoon of balsamic. You don't need to run to the store. Unless, of course, you don't have red wine vinegar....Then you might as well buy the balsamic...  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Bronx features edible garden - Carroll County Online Posted: 09 Aug 2009 04:42 PM PDT Bronx features edible garden NEW YORK — The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx is opening a new outdoor exhibit called The Edible Garden with programming that includes tastings, tours, demonstrations and celebrity lectures.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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