Finally, I get to rejoin the celebration of Bloom Day! It’s been a long time since November, but now, there’s plenty going on and more than enough for a post. I can’t resist taking a quick trip back to the beginning of the month, to revisit some of the beauties that have come and gone since early May, starting with fox’s grape (Fritillaria uva-vulpis):
I’m honored and delighted to be taking part in April’s Garden Designers Roundtable as a guest blogger. I’d feel out of place contributing on a design-specific subject in the company of all these professional designers, but I never run out of things to say about my favorite plants, so I jumped at the chance to join in on this topic. The hard part was deciding which plants would make the cut. Going with the “landscape” aspect, and attempting to keep this post a semi-reasonable length, I settled on three of my favorite woody plants.
“Hello, good evening and welcome to another edition of ‘Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror’, and later on we’ll be talking to a man who does gardening.” [Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 30]
Sadly, there are very few gardening references in Monty Python episodes and movies, but I treasure each one. The bits about shrubbery and recognizing different types of trees from quite a long way away come to mind fairly frequently, but I don’t often have the opportunity to use this one – until this week.
Clearly, I don’t have enough to do, if I have time to be playing around with e-publishing options. But it’s cold and snowing out (April Fool’s Day, indeed), and though I do have real work to do, investigating the world of e-books is way more absorbing at the moment. I’ve been surprised at how easy it is to create one, and I thought the rest of you might be interested in reading about some of the options I’ve found and experimented with.
![Sambucus nigra 'Aurea' [October 12, 2009]](http://hayefield.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/110.jpg "Sambucus nigra 'Aurea' [October 12, 2009]")
Inspired by some recent posts by Thomas over at Grounded Design, I’ve been thinking a good bit about the gardening trends I’ve seen come and go over the past 25-plus years. I’ve enjoyed exploring many of them myself, and even those that now seem rather boring or impractical have left traces on the garden I have today.
Back in the early to mid-90s, for instance, when I was developing my previous garden, mixed borders were a hot topic at lectures and conferences, and I totally bought into the idea. Trying to incorporate shrubs into my plantings was a real challenge, though, because that garden was very small. Then, I started hearing about the great “new” idea of cut-back shrubs, and wow – that made all the difference. Who knew that there were shrubs that would tolerate being cut back almost to the ground each year? They’d give height and mass and winter structure, and it took only one simple pruning step to keep them from taking up too much valuable border space.
