Every historic building has a story to tell
Spring/early summer is upon Kentucky, and this brief glorious period (before oppressive heat and humidity and worries about lack of rain sets in) coincides with my complete lack of attention to anything but the most pressing of matters – and my garden. My stack of library books gather cobwebs in the corner (I have a (read more)
Categories: Gardens, Kentucky Gardens
Tags: #garden, #gardenlife, #kentuckygarden, #kentuckygardener, #kentuckygardens, Gardening
In the fall of 2020, mired in the uncertainty of the world and convinced we might never venture off the farm again, my daughter and I ordered some tulip bulbs. Tulips, while beautiful, have never been a mainstay of any of my gardens. They are too expensive to be treated like annuals, and yet that (read more)
Category: Kentucky Gardens
Tags: Gardening, Gardens, Kentucky gardener, tulips
When I was young – maybe 8 or 9 years old – we had a series of droughts. A dryer than normal June turned into a parched July and August. Farm families not only make their living from the soil, but are wary yet devoted minders of the weather and Mother Nature. We still only (read more)
Categories: Gardens, Kentucky Gardens
Tags: drought, Gardening, Kentucky garden, rain dances
Gardening might be the closest I will ever come to magic in this world. The delight and wonder of growing plants transcends the sometimes ugly or thorny blemishes of reality – and I felt this way even before the Pandemic. If gardening is magic, then the tobacco hornworm is a troll, gnome, or orc (read more)
Categories: Gardens, Kentucky Gardens
Tags: caterpillars, garden pests, Gardening, hummingbird moth, Tobacco hornworms
The restoration of a historic building is a process of love and labor – one that has been made wildly popular by HGTV and other media outlets. I love watching a historic building come back to life – but the rebirth of the very land upon which that building rests – that is another story (read more)
Categories: Architecture, Historic Preservation, Kentucky, Kentucky architecture, Kentucky Gardens, Lexington Kentucky History, Lexington neighborhoods
Tags: African American history, Dr. Harriett B. Marble, Gardening, Gardens, Jim McKeighen, Kentucky gardens, Lexington gardens, Old Georgetown Street, Western Suburb
Last year at this time, I admired the row of lime trees at Chatsworth, exclaimed over the profusion of perennials and the striking color combinations in the walled garden at Parham, and drooled over the terraced beauty of the landscape at Renishaw Hall. Although I adored Petworth House, the Capability Brown landscape did not inspire (read more)
Gardening, to me, is intuitive. And yet it isn’t something to which words flow easily. I can write about houses, and places, and styles of architecture, but gardening is something done, a retreat from thoughts, the clamor of the world, and sometimes, a retreat even from myself. Gardening is what I do to escape from (read more)
Winter seemed very, very long this year. So as the last (I hope) of the snow melted, I bounded into the garden, (mud slushing underneath my feet) anxious to observe the awakening of the frozen earth. And then I groaned. Have you ever fallen in love with a plant? It is a mad crush, rendering (read more)
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