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  I first heard the term hellstrip when I was editing a garden design book a number of years ago. It embodies the despair that so many of us have felt as yet another hope-filled planting in our parking strip withers and dies. It can feel like a constant battle with tree roots, irrigation challenges, […]

  If you haven’t noticed, there are some especially bright faces popping up in gardens right about now. And I don’t mean the usual annuals that give us so much delight. I mean the poppies! – those cheery visitors that seem to show up out of nowhere from last year’s beds and sway in the […]

What started out as an innocent post about a certain pepper tree that I’ve grown to love, has turned into a horror story of epic proportions. I’ve discovered that my beloved Brazilian pepper is nothing more than an invasive, non-native weed, reviled throughout the horticulture/environmental communities. A menace to the native plants that our wildlife […]

I take a walk every day to a sweet little public garden near where I live now, in Southern California. Arlington Garden is my drug of choice, the antidote to – you know – everything that calls for an antidote. My new condo doesn’t have any soil to plant in, so I come to this […]

Last month I met a tree that was so unexpected, serene and downright Old Testament biblical, that it stopped me in my tracks and, for a little while, humbled my busy brain. I was in South Carolina with my St. Lynn’s compatriots Paul Kelly and Holly Rosborough, not far from Charleston. We parked the car […]