Situated on two and a half acres, the Breeze Hill estate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was home to J. Horace McFarland (1859-1948), an avid gardener, leading proponent of the City Beautiful Movement, and environmental preservationist. Planting began in 1909 by McFarland. The informal garden rooms were made up of contoured beds. Over many years of planting, […]
Our yard started out as a typical urban landscape; lawn, a few shrubs and trees. Maintaining this look was dependent on chemicals and lots of water, so we started to look for alternatives. We started by reducing the lawn, and planting more shrubs and plants that are native to our area. The garden has changed […]
I grew up listening to stories of my grandmother’s prize-winning roses. She loved to garden and I have photos of her in various gardens she visited around the world. The two photos I have submitted are her house garden in Fort Payne, Alabama. One is from 1975 with my sister in the roses and the […]
It came to the attention of the Fairbanks Garden Club that our city was in danger of losing a type of rose that was brought here over sixty years ago. The ‘Pier Bugnet’ rose has proven to be a very hardy one for our harsh environment. It thrives in fifty below zero temperatures in winter […]
Jeanne Beatrice Braud was born in Thibodaux, which was a small French speaking settlement in southern Louisiana, in 1887. There are records showing the family in Thibodaux, Lafourche parish by 1840. Growing up in Thibodaux at that time the family only spoke French. After marrying and starting a family, Beatrice and her husband, Jacque Toups, […]
It started because of a shared problem: the drug activity and prostitution in the abandoned double lot on Saltonstall and Lloyd. Adeli D. lived next door at the time, and remembers having to yell at the dealers who wandered through her driveway past her playing toddler to the empty house beside hers. Eventually, the young […]
I come from many gardens. My parents used to have a long strip of red clay in the Hickory Flats, and I remember picking peas from it in the summer, covered in sweat and bees. In fall, we would shuck an acre of corn and the cows would wait on the fence line, ready to […]
Last year I said goodbye to my gardening hero. Back in the day, sometime in the early 70s, my Dad became a foot soldier in the Crockett’s Victory Garden brigade, eager to try this whole new “organic gardening” thing, upend the typical grass-dominated suburban quarter acre and create a new Eden. He did it in […]
I would like to share with you a walk through my pollinator garden here in Shawneetown, Illinois. Nature is awesome, it is always fascinating at the things you see if you slow down to look. As we step out the door of the sunroom onto the bricked patio to the left, we have blue salvia […]