Country Gardener

Things are looking up: the past week brought us 9/10ths of an inch of rain over two days. It's amazing how quickly the lawn responds and...

It was bloody hot yesterday, about as hot as it gets here on the worst days in mid-summer, about 90 degrees F. But with the humidity, it fel...

Harvested in the nick of time I mentioned that we have been renovating our house - it's a bungalow and the work includes moving the k...

The central path at Tom Deacon's garden A couple of years ago in October, I was invited to give a talk about ornamental grasses to a ga...

It may be September, but the hot, record dry summer continues. It's going to be around 31 degrees C today and tomorrow (that's almos...

As September arrives and the gardening season begins to wind down, there's beauty in the fading away, such as these prairie coneflowers ...

A while back I wrote about the black slate fountain that my husband created. Since it's been running we've been amused to see that ...

View from patio on our back hill - note brown lawn in background As many others were contending with record rainfall and flooding, we staye...

One of my sisters lives in Algonquin, Illinois, near Chicago. In constrast to our never-ending drought, she reports: Crazy rain – we are no...

Click on the radar map to view bigger 4:30 a.m.: Wake to thunder and lightning and then finally some rain falling around 5 a.m. I take a cu...