Winter Spinach
I’m currently writing an article for Grit magazine about growing spinach. For the article, I’ve been growing a few different varieties and taking photos of them.
One of the things I love most about spinach is its winter hardiness. Not only will it withstand the cold nights of late fall and early spring, it’s actually better because of it.
Spinach is such a useful crop for those of us that live in the colder climates. They extend the season and allow us to harvest food from our gardens for a much longer season. It can be seeded fairly late in the fall and very early in spring, thus not taking up garden space during the prime growing season.
What are you harvesting from the garden right now?
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Heronswood
Hersonwood is a collector’s garden, the plants were brought from around the world for many years. The result is a garden that’s filled with a wide variety of interest. The sheer amount of plants was staggering, and our guide giving us the latin names for most of them was very impressive.
I certainly wish I had recorded her tour of the garden, I will never be able to recall or find what the majority of the plants were. They were stunning nonetheless, there’s no need to know latin names or even plant names to garden or appreciate a garden. Sometimes we can feel a bit self conscious in the gardening world if we don’t know the latin names or the common names of all the plants in our gardens. Pick plants you like, compose them in a way that makes you happy, and enjoy your garden.
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Friday Favorite: Hedges
Continuing with our tour of Heronswood garden in the Pacific Northwest, I had to post about hedges. I must admit, that a beautiful hedge makes me go weak in the knees. I’ve always dreamed about having beautiful hedges in my garden, but have yet to make that dream come true. I planted a short boxwood hedge in my Ohio garden (16 plants) and it was starting to grow out when we moved. Thankfully, the previous owners didn’t want the plants, so I dug them up and brought them with me. There are still in the nursery area, waiting until I have their final garden area finished. Most likely, they will be moved next spring to a new garden area right below the house.
On Wednesday, I talked about the scalloped hornbeam hedge at Hersonwood, behind this garden is a lovely formal garden with box lined triangular shaped beds. These beds are filled with a riot of colorful perennials that grow up and out and spill over the box borders. Here are just a few of the lovely flower spilling out of the box borders.
The beauty of a box hedge is that it contains some of the chaos that can happen in a perennial garden. It provides structure that grounds all the other plants. I can only imagine how lovely this garden looks in the winter, when all the flowers have faded but the bones of the box remain, it must be stunning!
I will never have hedges to this scale in my garden, at least not unless I hire a gardener to help me maintain them. There are still things I can take away from a garden like this. Even on a small scale, a hedge can something beautiful in the garden. So often we look at grand gardens like this and feel like we can never achieve anything like it. The truth is we can, we just have to look work within our boundaries. Even a five foot box hedge will provide the same feel in your garden.
Do you have any hedges in your garden? What’s your favorite hedge plant?
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Making the Most
When visiting Heronswood in the Pacific Northwest we noticed an upturned tree while walking down the main path to the house. When we saw the other side we were pleasantly surprised. It had been turned into a planting nook, which was perfect!
Sometimes things happen in the garden that are beyond on our control, we can choose to look at these as a setback or as an opportunity. I love that they used this space to grow beautiful things.
It’s a stunning feature and a showstopper in the garden, something so simple. Thinking outside the is a great quality to have as a gardener!
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Visiting an Icon
I can’t believe I never really posted photos of many of the gardens I visited last year when my mom and I went to Seattle. That’s the nature of the game, when I travel I end up behind both at work and in the garden. My return home is filled with too much paid work and I forget about things like looking through photos to post on the blog.
Heronswood has been on my “must-see” list for years, many, many years. Whenever I happened to be in the area it was closed or up for sale. Thankfully, I was able to schedule a private tour for my mom and I and a few blog readers who met up with us. It wasn’t the best day for a tour, the lighting wasn’t great, but we still enjoyed ourselves. The formal hedge garden was the part of the garden I was most excited about seeing and it didn’t disappoint.
The neatly trimmed arched hedges were simply stunning, something that I have always admired and would love to find a place to incorporate something like it here at Chiot’s Run. What struck me most about this garden is that it was so small. It would be something that would easily fit into a small city garden and is the perfect way to break up a very large garden.
If you’re bored of photos of this one part of the garden, too bad. It was the reason I came to visit this garden and I wanted to capture it from every angle (this is only a small portion of the photos of this part of the garden).
This garden was everything I expected it to be, and more. I won’t go into all to details, you can research that on your own. And beside, photos are much better than words anyways. Come back tomorrow for more photos of the other parts of this lovely garden.
