There are a few trees that most people can readily identify. Birch trees are one, no doubt about it. The graceful, multi-trunk form and light, peeling bark are pretty much iconic. Here in Virginia, the birches that do really well…
Common names for plants are a funny thing. They run the gamut from evocative – Queen Anne’s lace, butterfly weed – to kind of horrifying. Black chokeberry is so named because the fruit is so overwhelmingly bitter and astringent that…
When you say “Japanese maple” to most people, they picture a low, weeping tree, often with red or burgundy leaves trailing along the ground. There are a lot of wonderful upright Japanese maples, like the Bloodgood maple (Acer palmatum ‘Bloodgood’).…
Plant people often make fun of “normal people” for wanting to buy plants the way they would buy furniture. You can’t find a tree that’s relatively small, that’s native to the area, has gorgeous white blooms in the spring and…
Abelia is just one example of my ongoing love affair with “old fashioned” plants. We provide landscape design and landscape installation for a lot of historic properties, especially old farms, so I like to use the plants you’d expect to…
For years, I’d been talking about building a pizza oven in my backyard. At one point I found plans online for how to build a dome-shaped oven the old-fashioned way, a brick at a time, and that was my plan.…