After 2 years of experimenting, researching, and trying to find someone who could help implement my ideas, i FINALLY finished and planted the first phase of my front garden.

Any of you who have been following my garden making in Israel know that I am someone who can live with ambivalence. Not rushing to decision allows me to meander and play with new ideas.

I tried a container garden (and hand watering) last summer. I knew it had to go. I desperately wanted to have a garden where I could sink my hands into the dirt, push the soil around, and have dirty fingernails.

[Read more →]

“Why, when stabilization is built into many cameras and lenses, is a tripod so important ?” asked a student at a recent workshop.

I always ask my students to bring tripods to our photography workshops and stabilization is not the main reason.  It is true that a good tripod will provide a rock solid, steady platform for a tack sharp image, but it is even more important as a composition tool. [Read more →]

The Proteaceae family was named after the mythical god Proteus, son of Poseidon, because the flowers have so many forms. Proteus could foretell the future, but changed his shape so he didn’t have to.

Doesn’t the king protea above look like a snow cone?

And this banksia, a corn cob? The petals feel like coated plastic wire, the kind used in telephone cables. [Read more →]

The 50 Mile Bouquet is one of those books that gardeners (and those who love flowers) should have on their bookshelves. Debra Prinzing has done a stupendous job of inspiring and educating us about the slow flower movement. David Perry’s photographs….as always….don’t disappoint. They capture the sumptuous beauty of the flowers and the emotions on the faces of the growers. Fran Sorin

For our readers who aren’t familiar with you, can you tell them a bit about yourself?

Like many of us in garden writing, I have an eclectic background. Mine combines design and journalism, with a large dose of horticulture thrown in. I have an undergraduate degree in textiles and clothing, which led me to my first job in New York City at Seventeen Magazine in the early 1980s. When I moved back to Seattle, where I had spent three years in college, I worked for $500/month as an assistant editor at a women’s magazine and in marketing for an architectural textile design firm. That’s also when I started freelancing for design trade publications and started thinking about graduate school. In 1987-88, I spent a year at the University of Washington’s graduate school of Communications where I did all my master’s coursework, with a reporting emphasis on Seattle’s emerging fashion industry. While I never obtained my degree, those studies launched me into business journalism and I spent the next decade working for our major local business newspaper, Puget Sound Business Journal (I covered the “chic beats” – architecture, advertising, media, retail, hospitality, graphic design, and apparel manufacturing).

By 1997, while pregnant with my second child, I remember sitting at my desk one day thinking: I’m sick of interviewing dot.coms and CEOs. I want to be a garden writer. That simple utterance reflected the heavy influence of two close friends who were landscape designers; I called them my muses.

So here we are, 15 years later, and thanks to an inherent understanding of design principles; a long tenure as a working journalist; and several years taking horticulture classes at the local community college, I can legitimately call myself a Garden Writer. My specialty is design-related topics and now I spend about 75 percent of my time covering garden-themed stories and 25 percent of my time writing about architecture and interiors.

[Read more →]

Looking south over the walled garden over loch Ewe.

This is one of those really famous gardens, but in such a remote location that you don’t just drop in. Fifty miles from the nearest supermarket, inform my hosts, as if this is now the definition of distance from civilization or maybe survival. Inverewe on the north-west coast of Scotland is famous as a ‘sub-tropical’ garden, which is nonsense, but it is an illustration that with a bit of shelter, the climate here is amazingly west-coast mild, rarely that cold, and never hot – ideal for New Zealand flora and good for a lot of Himalayan foothill stuff. The contrast with the surrounding barren treeless scenery is extraordinary and gives the place its magic. [Read more →]