Being Anna Pavord

There can be great pleasure in reading gardening advice that has little or no practical relevance. That’s why we cherish the British garden writers. From Christopher Lloyd’s tropicals and perennials, to Graham Thomas’ roses, to Anna Pavord’s tulips, these titles remain the backbone of the literary gardening library. The fact that only a tiny area in the Pacific Northwest comes even vaguely close to equaling British conditions matters not a whit. American gardening anglophilia continues unabated.

Read the last Garden Rant at Kirkus on backyard gardens and the environment.

Why? It’s simple—the love of gardening ...

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Garden Rant: They shrunk the hostas!

Gardeners who have to deal with heavy soil, partial-to-full shade and aggressive tree roots know the value of hostas. They easily thrive under these difficult conditions to form a lush, rippling, green carpet, punctuated in midsummer by more or less attractive flowering spears. In my area of the world, I would say with confidence that hostas, daylilies and rudbeckias are among our top five go-to plants.

Read the last Garden Rant on Tomatoland.

And I imagine most gardeners know how many hostas are available. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. The temptation is to buy one of each—green with white stripes, blue ...

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Garden Rant: Weeds, Weeds, Weeds

Weeds—where would we be without them? How you define weeds is intrinsically connected to how you define gardening. For someone whose garden consists of little more than a front lawn, a back lawn and maybe a shrubbery surrounding the house, a weed could be anything higher than grass level that does not flower.

Read the last Garden Rant on books about the gardening life.

For example, a perennial garden I helped install on behalf of my neighborhood association consisted of—among other plants—epimedium, brunnera, daylilies (hemerocallis), Russian sage (perovskia) and flowering bulbs. The owner of the empty lot ...

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Garden Rant: Celebrating an unapologetic ornamentalist

For the past couple years, I’ve been fighting a feeling that I’m being left behind by the gardening world as part of a forgotten minority. The hottest trends have passed me by. I don’t grow food, I don’t raise chickens, I hide my compost bin, and I’ve never had a rain barrel. Don’t think there’s a powerful movement afoot? Here’s the opening line of Dominique Browning’s review of gardening books in the Sunday New York Times: “The garden book jury has returned a verdict. You are either growing vegetables or you ...

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Garden Rant: Gnomes!

Are gnomes the new vampires and fairies the new witches? And where do zombies fit in? For the most part, I accept with resignation the abundant presence of supernatural creatures in the worlds of literature and pop culture. Personally, I’d rather be entertained by more-or-less real people doing more-or-less real things. But there is no question that the Harry Potter, Twilight, Wicked and LOTR franchises are huge, and drag a flotilla of lesser-known fantastic inventions behind them.

Read the last Garden Rant on Cooking with Madhur Jaffrey at Kirkus.

The gnome phenomenon is part of a strange assortment of ...

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Garden Rant: The vines we love to hate—or is it hate to love?

Allan Armitage has a sensible attitude about aggressive climbers. It’s much like mine. If a given vine is a thug on your property, rampaging over other plants, clambering up trees and smothering any trellis that you’ve put up to contain it, then don’t grow it. But don’t try to make it impossible for anyone else to grow it.

Miss the last two Garden Rants? Catch up with Graham Rice on transatlantic gardening and Andrea Wulf on the founding gardeners.

Like many hyper-local endeavors, gardening does not readily adapt itself to one-size-fits-all advisories, and nowhere is that ...

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Bizarro gardening—not for the faint of heart

Beware. Be afraid. Not of the plants themselves, but of the exotic seduction they represent. The biggest danger with most of the plants listed in Bizarre Botanicals is not that they’ll eat you (though some would give it a college try), but that you’ll actually try to grow them. Eventually, you’ll get so obsessed with goofy plants that you’ll ruin any chance you ever had of a coherent garden.

Sometimes it’s not even the plants—it’s the names:

•Love lies bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus)
Amaranthus actually makes more sense in the garden as a foliage ...

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