To Maryland, with love
Posted on | October 2, 2023 | No Comments
So
me sites are easy to landscape, others aren’t. The job featured here wasn’t. Judge for yourself whether it was worth it by perusing this photo-essay of the conversion of a conventional garden to a wreath of Maryland’s native rudbeckias, lobelias, viburnums, junipers and asters. Those curious about plant identifications are encouraged to scroll beneath the pictures to the captions. For an all-out guide to gardening in the mid Atlantic, this resource directory, produced last spring for the Baltimore Banner, comes into its own again as fall affords an even more temperate window to establish new plantings.
Make yourself at home
Posted on | February 23, 2023 | No Comments
National Capitol Columns, US National Arboretum, Washington DC, Photo: Emily Green
This site is intended mainly as an online clipping service for the reporter Emily Green. Click here to be taken to the journalism archives. Occasional posts below vary between brain-on-fire moments and links to work published elsewhere. Sidebar links to various environmental sites are random acts of enthusiasm.
Bannon
Posted on | January 20, 2023 | 3 Comments
After 27 years of pot smoke seeping through the tenth floor hallway of the Wilshire Royale, the stoner in 1012 is dead. As new owners incrementally zhuzhed up the Beaux Arts building at Wilshire and Rampart, formerly a Howard Johnson’s, and a number of hotel and assisted living iterations before that, my friend David Bannon joked that he would only leave his corner unit feet first. That he did on January 11th, aged 77, after electing medically-assisted suicide in lieu of cancer treatment. Surviving relations, for whatever reasons, have so far left his obituary to a two-line death notice issued by the cremation company. This may have been Bannon’s instruction. His erasure only underscores the sense of loss. Eccentricity is dead. Movies have had their day. Reading is over. David Gerard Bannon will no longer live to watch movies and read books and talk about them with his fractured network of cineastes and people who read. Read more
Behold the holly
Posted on | December 16, 2022 | No Comments
A fine mess
Posted on | October 9, 2022 | No Comments
The photo series A year in a new garden documents the breaking out and replacement of a concrete driveway, big tree pruning, soil building, and sheet mulching of invasive ivy patches front and back. This snapshot, from a recent fall afternoon here in Baltimore City, is of the young patch of perennial wildflowers that replaced ivy in the back yard. The perennials planted last fall and last spring include milkweed, agastache, bergamot and giant blue lobelia. The goldenrod creeping in frame left is a welcome interloper from the neighbor’s yard. A pin oak sapling might just be visible in a slow effort to remove trees from under a power line and plant new ones well inside the garden borders. If it looks unkempt, it’s because the ground cover is largely left unmolested apart from reducing it with a string trimmer every couple of months. A perfect lawn isn’t perfect to this gardener. Moreover, where regular effort is made, it’s on things like refilling birdbaths and patrolling for emerging bindweed. It took a big push from October 2021 until October 2022 to have it look this gently wild.
North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
