Many thanks to Lois Rose, Master Gardener, for sending these photos of the New York Botanical Garden’s Native Plant Garden in its early stages last year.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Margaret Ransohoff’s Late Summer Garden
The first in a series on intriguing gardens and their gardeners.
Margaret’s late summer garden is a feast of exuberant color and form created with a mix of annuals and perennials: take a look at the flowers and foliage, and Margaret, herself, dressed as one of her favorite creatures, a butterfly.
Most striking in the above photo are the giant castor bean plants, grown this year from seeds of last year’s planting. See also, dahlias from tubers and cardoon at lower left.
Cutting garden of dahlias from tubers and zinnias from seed.
Margaret’s container arrangements show an exceptional sense of color and form.
Above container with canna, New Guinea impatiens, verbena and portulaca, surrounded by Gardenmeister fuchsia, petunias and annual blue lobelia.
The pot on the pedastal has canna, verbena and calibrachoa. It is surrounded by darmera peltata, hydrangea, blue cardinal flower (lobelia siphilitica).
She defines space and creates structure in the late summer with annuals, canna and zinnias.
Watch for further posts on Margaret’s garden in other seasons.
To Seamus Heaney in Heaven
To Seamus Heaney in Heaven
after ‘The Peninsula’
Sometimes, when you have nothing to say, it is because
water and ground in their extremity
swallow the words before they leave your mouth.
They’re in the dark again and will never arrive.
The sky road is like that. The road round the peninsula
rides toward a drunken sea and sky.
There is no horizon. The sky and the glazed sea meld.
The whitewashed gabled cottage you mentioned
is there at the point where all things merge and marry,
a compass for swallowed words.
It is as you said – the sea, and the islands riding the sea,
except there is no fog. This is Green Ireland
on a Best Day. Looking back, there is the ground rising,
and the road riding up the grassed hill,
a landscape clean in its own shape,
that holds the code to all landscapes.
Sometimes, when you still have nothing to say,
after a long drive round a peninsula,
it is because water and ground in their extremity
have swallowed worlds.