By Will Rowlands Page Dickey’s former garden – Duck Hill in North Salem, New York – is well-known to garden buffs. It’s been featured in numerous publications and Dickey has written two books about it. Things changed when Dickey and her husband, Francis Schell, started considering a move. She was thinking of another quirky farmhouse, an apple orchard and maybe a real meadow. Who can blame her? I’d like a meadow and an orchard of Northern Spies. Dickey’s reasons for leaving are familiar to many of us: they were getting older, the cost of living was high and the three acres of intensive plantings were a challenge … and there…
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The Spotted Lanternfly is Here
The CT Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) has announced the detection of an adult spotted lanternfly, Lycoma delicatula, in Stamford and West Haven, and several live adults in Greenwich and New Canaan. Surveys in the areas of the detections will be conducted. Single adults were discovered in Farmington in 2018 and Southbury in 2019. The spotted lanternfly (SLF) is an invasive sap-feeding planthopper that was originally discovered in Berks County, Pennsylvania in 2014. It is native to China, India and Vietnam. SLF attacks many hosts and has the potential to severely impact farm crops, particularly apples, grapes and hops, and a number of tree species including maple. In addition to Pennsylvania…
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Summer Wildflowers
By Anne Rowlands Carol Gracie’s Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast now has a companion volume, Summer Wildflowers of the Northeast, focusing on wildflowers that bloom between early June and late September. She continues with the same winning format of interesting, well-researched and beautifully photographed essays. The book is written in essay form to appeal to all who share an interest in wildflowers and is arranged alphabetically by the most widely used common name (along with the scientific name). Each essay – there are 35 – focuses on a summer-blooming species that can be found in the Northeastern quarter of the United States. There’s a considerable amount of information included on…
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Spirit of Place
By Will Rowlands Bill Noble didn’t start out with a degree in horticulture, botany or landscape design. He grewup in Norwalk and had an assortment of jobs as a young man, including construction and market gardening. He got a lot of experience when he landed a job in the ’70s at the property of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, NH. Saint-Gaudens was a prominent sculptor in the 1800s. As many as 100 other artists and performers joined him there and the area eventually became the Cornish Art Colony. It was a place where artists such as Maxfield Parrish and Frederic Remington, and performers like Ethel Barrymore and Isadora Duncan, could escape…
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Clover – Back in Style
By Will Rowlands An interesting thing happened this spring. I had recently finished a story about the positive aspects of dandelions and was enjoying not chasing around after them when, all of a sudden, it struck me that we had a lot of clover in our lawn. I remember clover in lawns when I was kid back in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a traditional part of lawn-seed mixes until people started using broad-leaf herbicides. The chemicals were meant to kill dandelions, plantains and other “weeds” but they also killed clover. In those less enlightened times, people didn’t necessarily want to attract bees and other pollinators to their yard,…
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Herbaceous Perennial Plants
By Anne Rowlands Like many of you, I’m a garden book collector, but with limited space in our little house there’s a constant churn – books come in, are read and evaluated, and either make the cut or get passed on. My very first serious gardening book was a thick encyclopedia of perennials that I studied for hours at a time. (I’m hopelessly addicted to field guides and the like.) That first book was eventually passed along, and though we have other books on perennials (why just one?), it seemed high time we get our own copy of Dr. Allan Armitage’s perennial bible. After all, Armitage first published this in…
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Anne Previews Sept/Oct 2020
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Traveler – Adelgid Resistant Hemlock
By Kim Kaplan A first-of-its-kind hybrid hemlock, which is not vulnerable to the insect hemlock woolly adelgid, has been developed by the Agricultural Research Service’s (ARS) U.S. National Arboretum. Traveler, as the new variety is named, is a cross between the Chinese hemlock (Tsuga chinensis) and the native Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana). The new tree has the native hemlock’s handsome symmetrical evergreen growth habit with slightly weeping branches. It has a moderately slow growth rate and produces large cones. But its most important characteristic is the ability to survive attack from the hemlock woolly adelgid. “We’ve had trials of Traveler growing since 2000, and we haven’t seen any damage from…
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Experiment Station Has New Director
NEW HAVEN, CT, April 8, 2020 – The Board of Control of The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven has appointed Dr. Jason White as director. He began his new position on April 1, 2020. Dr. White is the 10th director in the storied 145-year history of the Experiment Station and will replace Dr. Theodore Andreadis who has retired after 42 years of service to CAES and the State of Connecticut. Dr. White served as the agency’s vice director for the last six years. A Pennsylvania native, Dr. White joined the research staff of the Experiment Station in 1997. Before being chosen as director, he was the chief scientist…
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2020 Perennial Plant of the Year
The Perennial Plant Association’s 2020 Perennial Plant of the Year is Aralia cordata ‘Sun King’ (Golden Japanese spikenard). The following description is from Walters Gardens – waltersgardens.com “An excellent complement to hostas and woodland perennials, ‘Sun King’ emerges mid-spring with bright gold leaves held on nicely contrasting reddish brown stems. If given at least a few hours of sun a day, the foliage will remain yellow all summer. In heavier shade, the foliage ranges from chartreuse to lime green. This plant quickly forms a large clump of foliage which amazingly resists deer browsing. It reportedly grows just three feet tall and wide, though many plantsmen believe it will grow larger…
