Category: Garden plantings

What Ice Age Floods Have to do with Your Garden

The thunk, thunk of a chef’s knife nearby, Abby and I swapped stories at Lovely in downtown Springfield. It was late January. The new year buzz was as strong as the coffee in my veins, as rich as the soil in Ami and Jeff’s garden, as fertile as the friendship between us. … more

Category: Garden plantings

Brighten Solstice with Snowberries

It was on one of those dim, fogged mornings when the remaining leaves on the trees appear to yearn for the ground, heavy like newly washed hair, limbs blurred with mist, the lines of them made more distant, remote, out-of-reach, and the grasses and tall perennials on the ground slump, arch, and … more

Category: Garden plantings

Smells like October

wet spring followed by this, a parched, dry fall. crush of katsura leaves underfoot releasing toasted warmth, buttery, cozy, smell of fall. catch a whiff of gardenia-scented silverberry blossoms, of sweet perfumed eternal fragrance daphne, or salad freshness of sasanqua camellia, and rotting figs, fermenting apples, wildfire smoke on the wind. dry … more

Category: Garden plantings

Plant of the Month – Oregon Ash

Fraxinus latifolia     Grays skies of October welcomely wet, wool sweaters and boots return, dust and wildfire smoke retreat. And under this muted lid, a pool of green gold in the lay of the land, the lowland fold. Bright against moody Doug fir and dark oak bough, singing clear near bleached … more

Category: Garden plantings

The Art of the Open Air Living Room Garden

“If beauty’s understood as a form of order, its elements perfectly self-regulating, then an orderly day is not a worn circuit, or rote, but a haven and a habitat.” Lia Purpura Too often the habitat garden, the wildlife garden, the native garden appears a mess, chaotic and uninviting to the human animal … more

Category: Garden plantings

Madia Seeds & Other Revelations of Disturbance

  pal-imp-sest n. A manuscript that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible. n. An object or area that has extensive evidence of or layers showing activity or use.   I scale the thin soil of Skinner’s Butte daily, birdsong and Leela dog … more

Category: Garden plantings

Spring Equinox is for You, Mahonia

How much time do you spend looking out the window over your kitchen sink? If you’re like me, it’s a daily ritual to gaze out at the world while washing up and preparing food. I wrote in January about the winter display of cedar waxwings descending on tiny rose hips out my … more

Category: Garden plantings

Be My Violet

  Many years ago, with a basket hooked in one elbow and my young son’s small hand in the other, I walked through the welcome sun of a February day. Neighborhood drifts of green-hearted leaves, dotted with purple flower faces, our destination. The small patch of sweet violets in our home garden … more

Category: Garden plantings

You Were Taught That to Care Means Neatness

1 You were taught that to care means neatness that care looks tidy. It’s modeled this way everywhere you look. Autumn’s debris removed from sight, earth bare (barren), swept, raked, scraped clean, empty, sterile. And so, at home, the place you care for most, with your time, with your attention, with your … more

Category: Garden plantings

Phases of a Garden Retreat

Back in 2010 we installed half of our design for a very special garden retreat in the hills outside Eugene. The garden is detached from the house in a sunny clearing in the woods. The first phase included a hardy kiwi entry pergola, a flagstone dining patio topped with a custom grape … more