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The Maine Coast

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on August 23, 2012 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

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Gorgeous yachts and sailboats cruise around Casco Bay, Maine, all the time.

My blog posts generally contain a lot of substantive content supported by photos. I thought I would take a break from that approach with this post to show my many readers from all over the world and from other parts of the US photos of the Maine coast. Maine is a state located in the continental US in the far upper northeastern corner in a region called New England. It is one of the least populated and least developed US states. All the photos I am going to show you were taken in Casco Bay, which is located in the southern part of Maine right off Portland, the most populous city. Almost anywhere in Casco Bay or along the coast could produce photos like these, but most of these photos were taken on one small island.

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As we sail off on our exploration of the Maine Coast, keep in mind that the plants you see are almost all native. Unlike most parts of the US, the native landscape is relatively undisturbed in Maine. That is why, at my family’s home in Maine, I garden almost exclusively in containers. The native landscape is more beautiful than anything that I could create.

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We end with the obligatory sunset, beautiful and different every day. I hope you have enjoyed your tour and will consider visiting Maine someday.

Carolyn

Nursery Happenings: The nursery is closed until the fall. Thanks for a great spring season!

If you are within visiting distance and would like to receive catalogues and information about customer events, please send your full name and phone number to carolynsshadegardens@verizon.net. Subscribing to my blog does not sign you up to receive this information.

Facebook: Carolyn’s Shade Gardens has a Facebook page where I post single photos, garden tips, and other information that doesn’t fit into a blog post. You can look at my Facebook page here or click the Like button on my right sidebar here.

Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information. If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.) or to subscribe to my blog, just click here.

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Historic Bartram’s Garden

Posted in garden to visit, native plants, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2012 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

John Bartram House, Philadephia, Pennsylvania, US

 

“Whatsoever whether great or small ugly or handsom sweet or stinking…every thing in the universe in their own nature appears beautifull to mee.”

John Bartram 1740

 

For Mother’s Day this May, I was surprised with a picnic and visit to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, the oldest surviving botanic garden in North America.  Prominent Philadelphia Quakers, John Bartram (1699-1777) and his son William (1739-1823) were the most important American plant explorers of the 18th century, traveling south to Florida, west to the Mississippi, and north to Lake Ontario.  They introduced more than 200 native plants into cultivation.  By mid-century, their 102 acre garden (now 45 acres) contained the most extensive collection of North American plants in the world.

Native Bartram oak, Quercus x heterphylla, a rare hybrid between red oak, Quercus rubra, and willow oak, Quercus phellos, discovered by John Bartram.

“…the Botanick fire set me in such A flame as is not to be quenched until death or I explore most of the…vegitative treasures in No. America.”

John Bartram 1761

 

The intrepid Bartrams shared their discoveries with scientists throughout America and Europe, especially England.  John Bartram’s discoveries were considered so important that he was appointed Royal Botanist by King George III.  Bartram founded the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia with his friend and colleague Benjamin Franklin.  In addition, he started a thriving seed and plant business with his lists appearing in London publications as early as the 1750s.  In 1783, Bartram published the first American nursery catalogue.  [Historical information and quotes courtesy of Bartram’s Garden.]

John Bartram purchased his farm in 1728 and completed this portion of the stone house in 1731.


The house and gardens are a National Historic Landmark and have been well preserved despite their location in a very developed part of Philadelphia. Fortunately, they were acquired by the city in 1891 and became part of the public park system.  The property is on the banks of the Schuylkill River and is a joy to visit both to see the historic buildings and to wander through the peaceful gardens.  I would visit Bartram’s Garden just to see the specimen trees.   I am going to take you on a short photographic tour below, but I highly recommend an actual visit.

This formal façade, which faces the gardens, was added between 1758 and 1770.

 

 

Close up of the façade

 

 

Carved stone window in the facade

 

 

This pristine example of a two-level Pennsylvania bank barn was built in 1775.

 

 

Stone watering trough

 

 

John Bartram’s first experimental garden

 

 

Looking from the house towards the kitchen and stables

 

 

Walking along the wooden boardwalk by the river

 

 

The foundation of this simple mill based on an ancient European design was carved from the bedrock next to the river.

 

 

Apples were crushed in the circular trench by a wooden wheel.

 

 

There are some very beautiful wetlands on the shores of the river.

 

If you love trees, and especially specimen trees as I do, you don’t want to miss seeing the huge mostly native trees at Bartram’s Garden.  I include photos of some of them below, but they are so large that it is hard to get a good photograph.  You have to see them in person to truly appreciate their magnificence.

 

The oldest ginkgo tree, G. biloba, in North America planted by William Bartram in 1785.

 

 

Luckily there was a field below this amazing American yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea, so I could get a photo of the whole tree.

 

 

The house next to the yellowwood gives it some scale.  We were fortunate to catch it in full bloom.

 

 

Yellowwood flowers

 

 

Under the yellowwood tree

 

 

American beech, Fagus grandifolia

 

 

Native willow oak, Quercus phellos

 

 

 

Native common hackberry, Celtis occidentalis


Bartram’s Garden is a public park and is open all year for self-guided tours except city-observed holidays.  I hope you have the chance to visit.

 

Carolyn

Nursery Happenings:  The nursery is closed until the fall.  Thanks for a great spring season!

If you are within visiting distance and would like to receive catalogues and information about customer events, please send your full name and phone number to carolynsshadegardens@verizon.net.  Subscribing to my blog does not sign you up to receive this information.

Facebook:  Carolyn’s Shade Gardens has a Facebook page where I post single photos, garden tips, and other information that doesn’t fit into a blog post.  You can look at my Facebook page here or click the Like button on my right sidebar here.

Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information.  If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.) or to subscribe to my blog, just click here.

 

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In Which I Decide To Be Thankful

Posted in garden essay, green gardening, native plants, Uncategorized with tags , , on November 22, 2011 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

All photos in this post were taken in and around Cliff Island, Maine, U.S., in summer or fall.  Click on any photo to enlarge.

This is my 2011 Thanksgiving essay.  Last year in My Thanksgiving Oak Forest, I described why my husband and I decided to transplant native red oak seedlings to a waste area filled with invasive plants.  If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I hope you will click here because I think it is my most important post. This year’s essay is a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full kind of story, which ends with me deciding to be thankful, always a good result at any time of year.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I spend a lot of time on a small island seven miles off the coast of Maine called Cliff Island.  The island is a very special place for many reasons.  Physically, it is achingly beautiful, surrounded by rocky shores and ocean and with acres of woods, marshes, and beaches created by nature and for the most part preserved that way, although it is all private land. 

Our family has no vehicle so I walk three to four miles every day often to get places but predominantly for pleasure.  And while I walk I think.  In the midst of all this beauty I am often sad.  Aside from public land, few places remain in the eastern U.S. like Cliff Island where the ecology is not rapidly changing for the worse.

Surrounded by a close to pristine landscape, I mourn for what southeastern Pennsylvania, where I live, must have been like and how it has been changed beyond recognition and probably beyond redemption.  As Heather from Restoring the Landscape with Native Plants says: “Although many of our woodland landscapes have been invaded with invasive species and altered by humans, diminished representations of the former plant community still exist and provide us with a window of what the woodland used to be [emphasis added].”

I think about how most people don’t know, and many of them don’t care, what a real native landscape looks and feels like.  How will we preserve the precious areas that remain if people have no context within which to appreciate them?  Jill on Landscape Lover’s Blog describes a noted French landscape architect as pointing out that “most people prefer highly-managed places – pleasurable gardens and efficient landscapes – over raw nature, which is increasingly perceived as distant, unpleasant, almost repellent, with its insects, bacteria, and disorder [emphasis added].”  Is that true?  I am afraid so.

Even Cliff Island is under attack with invasive non-native plants making their way out from the mainland and displacing the island’s delicate native ecology.  We currently have a full scale battle going on with Japanese knotweed, purple loosestrife, oriental bittersweet, multiflora rose, Japanese barberry, burning bush euonymus, and Norway maple.  These plants have only started multiplying invasively on Cliff Island in the last 20 years or so and yet the rate of increase is exponential.

On better days, when my half-full attitude takes over, I am deliriously thankful that I get to spend time on Cliff Island.  I stare at the landscape trying to burn it into my memory for viewing during the rest of the year.  I find it so beautiful that it seems unreal, like a movie set.  I never get tired of it.  No designed garden can compare with what nature has created.

I am also eternally thankful that I am able to appreciate this natural beauty.  That I don’t prefer highly managed landscapes and that I love being outside.  I am grateful that my training enables me to understand how the plant communities on the island work and to appreciate the ornamental characteristics of the native plants.

I am thankful that Cliff Island’s balance has not been destroyed.  In Pennsylvania, any unplanted area is soon filled with invasives.  On the island, the regenerative power of the native plants remains in tact.  An area of abandoned lawn will quickly be re-colonized by blueberries, goldenrod, bayberry, asters, and other natives.

I am also thankful that, four years ago, I was able to launch a non-native invasive plant removal program on Cliff Island.  Volunteers from the community are working hard to remove invasives before they become established like they are on the mainland.  I am happy to report that the program is a huge success.  If you would like to know more about the program, please feel free to email me at carolynsshadegardens@verizon.net.  Nothing would make me happier than to help others preserve their native landscape.

Readers of my 2010 Thanksgiving post will be pleased to know that we are continuing what will now be our Thanksgiving tradition and have planted three more native red oaks at the bottom of our property.

Happy Thanksgiving, Carolyn


Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information.  If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.) or to subscribe to my blog, just click here.


Nursery Happenings: The nursery is closed for the year.  Look for the snowdrop catalogue (snowdrops are available mail order) in January 2012 and an exciting new hellebore offering in February 2012.  If you are within visiting distance and would like to receive catalogues and information about customer events, please send your full name and phone number to carolynsshadegardens@verizon.net.  Subscribing to my blog does not sign you up to receive this information.

54 Comments »

Happy Birthday Carolyn’s Shade Gardens

Posted in Uncategorized with tags on November 3, 2011 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

This photo of my display gardens illustrated my first post.

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens’ first article appeared on November 3, 2010, so my blog is one year old today.  When you are one year old, you don’t want to celebrate an anniversary—that’s for adults—you want to celebrate a birthday.  So this is my blog’s first birthday party during which I am going to immodestly and unashamedly (like a one-year-old) celebrate all that my blog has accomplished in the last year, illustrated with some of my favorite collages (click on any collage to enlarge).  You are all invited to celebrate along with me.

Spring flowers at Carolyn’s Shade Gardens

To say that my blog has exceeded my expectations would be an understatement.  Almost every customer who has visited my nursery this year has told me how much they enjoy it.  In addition, in my first year I have had over 81,000 views, and 660 readers are permanent subscribers. 

Epimediums

However, about a week before I started it, I didn’t really know what a blog was or what it could do.  I just knew that I was frustrated because I couldn’t easily communicate to my plant nursery customers all the interesting things that I have learned about shade gardening over the almost 20 years I have been in business (and the 35 years I have been gardening).  I was thinking about a website, but then I realized that a blog is the best of both worlds, an interactive website where I can place basic information that doesn’t change, but also write articles and show photographs of everything that intrigues me about shade gardening.

Primroses at Carolyn’s Shade Gardens

I have published 58 articles in the last year, and when I looked back, I realized that most of them fall into six categories: plant profiles, design, “how to”, places to visit, musings, and sustainability.  As part of the celebration, I want to recap my favorites (I will talk about your favorites later).  To view the actual article, click on the orange link.

Christmas roses, Helleborus niger

If you have been reading this blog and my plant profiles, you know that I love plants and that I am addicted to certain plant groups (genera) about which I won’t shut up.  I am very proud of my six part series on hellebores because, although there is still more to be said about hellebores, a reader will have a very good background on these beautiful, winter-blooming, deer resistant plants after reading my articles. 

I have written a lot about hellebores.

I am also an admitted galanthophile (snowdrop addict) so I enjoyed confessing my love for snowdrops in three parts.  I share a love of hostas with my customers, and it’s fun writing about them, especially the miniatures.  Camellias, wintergreen ground covers, and woody plants for shade have also been hot topics.  Finally, I have really enjoyed my Garden Bloggers Bloom Day posts on the fifteenth of the month, highlighting shade plants blooming in my garden.


A galanthophile’s favorite thing

Design articles included Pleasurable Pairings for Spring with some great plant combinations and New Year’s Resolution to Edit the Garden where I urged readers to edit their lives and their gardens.  How to divide hybrid hellebores allowed me to show off an article I wrote for Horticulture magazine and Shade Gardening in Fall: Leaves on the Lawn contains valuable time-saving advice.  Did you know that you can mow up to 18″ of leaves right on your lawn and leave them there? 

Chanticleer, A Pleasure Garden, in Wayne, PA

I have had a lot of fun visiting gardens, nurseries, and horticultural events and writing about my experiences.  The last year included trips to Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, the Philadelphia International Flower Show,  Chanticleer, Duke Gardens, and Juniper Level Botanic Gardens, among others. 

Philadelphia International Flower Show

I think I have the most fun writing articles that contain my “musings”.  In I Dream in Latin and Snowdrops: Further Confessions of a Galanthophile, I hope (and thought) I was amusing while discussing some of the intricacies of the plant world.   Readers were intrigued by my unresolved inquiry into whether snowdrops are thermogenic.  My essay on The Joys and Sorrows of Snow struck a chord (and is particularly apropos right now!).  Finally, I was so happy that I was able to communicate my delight in meeting Walter Young of Young’s Perennials in Freeport, Maine. 

Summer flowers at Carolyn’s Shade Gardens

The most important topic covered on my blog, and the one closest to my heart, is sustainability and how all gardeners, including me, can help the environment.  In My Thanksgiving Oak Forest, I described how Doug Tallamy in his book Bringing Nature Home helped me finally understand how important native plants are to our survival.  Part One and Part Two of an article on supporting sustainable living talked about my own efforts in this area.  Powered by Compost, Letting Go: The Lawn, and Fall Clean-up describe some concrete steps everyone can take.


A few of my favorite miniature hostas

Well now you know some of my favorites, but which articles are your favorites?  My blog host, WordPress, has wonderful statistics showing the most viewed posts and the most commented posts.  Views come from three places: my subscribers and customers, other garden bloggers, and Goggle searches, which is probably my biggest source.  My most viewed post by far is Miniature (& Small) Hostas.  The rest of the top five are Evergreen Ferns for Shade, 2011 Snowdrop Catalogue (this is a permanent page not a post), New Shade Perennials for 2011, and New Native Shade Perennials for 2011. 

European wood anemone, A. nemorosa

Another way of measuring popularity is the number of comments on a post.  However, because most of my comments come from other garden bloggers, most commented usually, but not always, shows which posts they liked the best.  Six out of my top ten most commented posts were written for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day with the most commented being May GBBD: An Embarrassment of Riches.  On GBBD, garden bloggers from all over the world post photos of what’s blooming in their gardens on the blog May Dreams Gardens—it’s a lot of fun.  Setting aside GBBD, articles that many different viewers felt compelled to comment on covered getting rid of your lawn, whether snowdrops are thermogenic, An Ode To Seed Strain Hellebores, miniature hostas, and snow. 

Green is beautiful.

Which brings me to a completely untintended consequence of my blog—I now communicate on a regular basis with bloggers from all over the U.S. and the world.  I read blogs and get comments from India to Scotland, Australia to Russia, and Jordan to Argentina.  You can click here and run your cursor over the map to see all the locations (my personal favorite is Ascension Island).  Garden bloggers are a really fun group, and I treasure my interactions with them.

Fall flowers at Carolyn’s Shade Gardens

I have three important goals for next year.  First, I would like to improve my photography, particularly my landscape shots.  I will probably need a new camera.  Second, I would like to update the layout of my blog, which terrifies me because I don’t like technology.  Finally, I would like to encourage more comments and questions from my nursery customers.  Just scroll down to the box marked “Leave a Reply” and type something in.  If you are enjoying my blog, you can thank me by using this resource.

Enjoy,  Carolyn

Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information.  If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.) or to subscribe to my blog, just click here.


Nursery Happenings: The nursery is closed for the year.  Look for the snowdrop catalogue (snowdrops are available mail order) in January 2012 and an exciting new hellebore offering in February 2012.  If you are within visiting distance and would like to receive catalogues and information about customer events, please send your full name and phone number to carolynsshadegardens@verizon.net.  Subscribing to my blog does not sign you up to receive this information.

110 Comments »

April GBBD: How to Choose

Posted in bulbs for shade, Garden Blogger's Bloom Day, hellebores, native plants, Shade Perennials, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on April 14, 2011 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

Time is just flying by, and we have reached the middle of the month when I encourage each of you to walk around your garden and assess what you need to add to make early spring an exciting time in your landscape.  Do you need more early flowering trees like magnolias and cherries to give you a reason to stroll in your garden?  Could your garden benefit from flowers that bloom in early April like native spring ephemerals, bulbs, pulmonarias, and hellebores?

Make a list and take photographs so that when you are shopping this spring you know what you need and where it should go.  It’s beautiful outside, and you never know what you might find hiding in your garden like this ethereal double-flowered hellebore (pictured above), which I discovered during my own  inventory.  Usually I recommend a local garden to visit for inspiration, but I have to say Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is pretty inspiring right now!

Flowering quince, Chaenomeles x superba ‘Texas Scarlet’, with ‘White Lady’ hybrid hellebore

Today is Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day for April when gardeners around the world show photos of what’s blooming in their gardens (follow the link to see  photographs from other garden bloggers assembled by Carol at May Dreams Gardens).  Here are  some more highlights from my mid-April stroll through Carolyn’s Shade Gardens, but to see it all you will have to visit as Jean from Jean’s Garden and Jan from Thanks for Today are doing this Sunday.

My early magnolias are in full bloom.  Magnolias are my favorite flowering trees, and I want to share these early-blooming varieties with you:

Northern Japanese Magnolia, Magnolia kobus ‘Wada’s Memory’, has the most beautiful form of any magnolia.  The branches curve upwards to form an elongated pyramid, which is maintained even on mature plants.

‘Wada’s Memory’ flower

Star magnolia, Magnolia stellata, blooms so early that it often gets damaged by frost, but amazingly the flowers are magnificent this year.

Star magnolia flowers

I have waited over 15 years for my Yulan magnolia, Magnolia denudata, to bloom, but once I saw mature trees at Longwood Gardens, I had to have one!  It was worth the wait.

My ingenious 13-year-old son used a grappling hook to pull a branch down and clip a Yulan magnolia flower for me to photograph.

There are so many beautiful hellebores in bloom that I made collages of my favorite flowers so that this whole post wasn’t dedicated to hellebores:

Clockwise from upper left: seedling double hybrid hellebore, ‘Mrs. Betty Ranicar’, ‘Velvet Lips’ (don’t you love that name?), ‘Painted Bunting’

Clockwise from upper left: seedling petaloid hybrid hellebore, ‘Blue Lady’, Helleborus x nigercors ‘Green Corsican’ (cross between Corsican hellebore and Christmas rose), seedling in ‘Double Melody’ strain

Clockwise from upper left: double from ‘Golden Lotus’ seed strain, ‘Raspberry Mousse’, ‘Goldfinch’, seedling petaloid hybrid hellebore

I could dedicate the whole post to epimediums too so here are more collages:

Clockwise from upper left: ‘Yubae’, Epimedium x rubra, ‘Cherry Tart’, ‘Sweetheart’

Clockwise from upper left: ‘Shrimp Girl’, ‘Orange Queen’, Epimedium x warleyense, ‘Cupreum’

I have a collection of about 15 varieties of European wood anemones, and April is their time to shine.  They are very easy to grow in shaded woodland conditions:

Left to right from upper left: Anemone nemorosa pink form; Anemone x seemanii; ‘Alba Plena’; ‘Leed’s Variety’; ‘Bractiata’; ‘Allenii’; ‘Vestal’; Anemone ranunculoides; ‘Wyatt’s Pink’

European wood anemones spread to form a sizable and eye-catching patch even in dry shade, photo above of the yellow flowers of Anemone ranunculoides.

I want to share so many exciting blooming plants with you that I don’t know how to choose the photographs to include, hence the title of this post.  Here are other plants that made the cut:

Red lungwort, Pulmonaria rubra ‘Redstart’, is a very unusual pulmonaria with green fuzzy leaves.

Winterhazel, Corylopsis species, unfortunately for the first time ever our late freezes damaged most of the flowers.

Obviously not a bloom, but I wanted to show you the early color of native variegated dwarf Jacob’s ladder, Polemonium reptans ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

Native rue anemone, Anemonella thalictroides double pink form

I planted a mixture of daffodils in the middle of my raised beds, and this lovely seedling appeared in the path.

Native cinnamon fern, Osmunda cinnamomea, is gorgeous as it unfurls.

A seedling Helleborus multifidus underplanted with the spring ephemeral  Cardamine quinquefolia.

The many colors of Corydalis solida when allowed to seed.  I am planning an article on this plant in the future.

Who could have planned this combination?  Native coral bells, Heuchera villosa ‘Caramel’, with a seedling glory-of-the-snow, Chionodoxa forbesii.

The new leaves and flowers of Japanese coral bark maple, Acer palmatum ‘Sango-kaku’, are breathtaking in early spring.  For the full story on this four season tree, read my article Coral Bark Maple.

My latest spring-blooming camellia addition, Camellia x ‘April Rose’, a formal double.


For breath-taking beauty in early spring you can’t beat cherry trees:

A very mature Yoshino cherry, Prunus x yedoensis, that came with our property.  I love the fleeting nature of the flowers and look forward to the day every spring when it rains petals in my nursery.  Its orange fall color is spectacular.

My favorite cherry (at least for today), Prunus x incam ‘Okame’, dominates my courtyard garden in early spring.


I will end with a heart full of cherry blossoms because I love early spring!

Please let me know in a comment/reply what flowers are blooming in your early spring garden.  If you participated in GBBD, please provide a link so my nursery customers can read your post.

Carolyn


Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information.  If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.), just click here.

Nursery Happenings: My second open house sale is this Saturday, April 16, from 10 am to 3 pm, featuring early spring-blooming plants for shade.

97 Comments »

I Need Your Help

Posted in Uncategorized on January 5, 2011 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

On December 26, 2010, in New Year’s Resolution to Edit the Garden, I wrote about being inspired to edit my garden (and life) by my friend Kartik’s decision to simplify his life after visiting his family in India.  The post really struck a chord with numerous comments, 107 picks on Blotanical by 33 garden bloggers around the world, and several links.  I am writing to you now because three days after I posted, Kartik’s 5-year-old daughter, Tara, was diagnosed with leukemia.  She is in the hospital right now for a minimum of 5 weeks receiving chemotherapy and will need two years of chemotherapy after that.

Kartik and his family have a long, hard road ahead of them, and I would like to ease their trip in even a very small way if I can.  But how to do that?  And then I read Allan Becker’s powerful post in which he describes  garden bloggers as a  “supportive social group that swarms around its members when they need to be comforted, validated or encouraged.”  I hope and believe that what Allan says is true because I am appealing to you to help me provide a small amount of comfort to Tara and Kartik, whom I made part of our community through my original post.

Kartik says the hardest thing for him is when Tara starts acting wild from being confined to a hospital bed 24/7: difficult for an adult but impossible for a five-year-old.  I would like to do something to provide a few moments of distraction for Tara every day.  With Kartik’s permission, I am asking everyone who reads this post and feels moved to send Tara a card representative of your home state in the US or your country.  Opening her mail from you will be a welcome relief, and I intend to send her a map of the world with sticky stars to mark the location of every card she receives.

Address: Tara Patel, 2216 Oakwyn Road, Lafayette Hill, PA  19444, USA.

My hope is that you will do this if you feel moved but not feel an obligation.  Your unwritten thoughts and prayers are welcome too.  If bloggers want to publicize my request among their blogging friends that would also be welcome.

Every day I try to focus on how lucky I am and avoid getting bogged down in the little set backs of life.  I am not usually successful, but Kartik’s inspirational approach to life and the way he is handling his daughter’s illness will keep me focused for a long time now.

Thank you,

Carolyn

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Carolyn’s Shade Gardens Blog

Posted in Shade Gardening, Uncategorized with tags on November 3, 2010 by Carolyn @ Carolyns Shade Gardens

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

I am very excited to announce that I am starting a blog on shade gardening.  One of the frustrating parts of my business is not being able to tell my customers  and others all the interesting things that I have learned about shade gardening over the 18 years I have been in business (and the 35 years I have been gardening).  My open house sales are too busy.  Emails are too cumbersome (and possibly unwanted).  However, almost every day, I think of something that I have learned, observed, or experienced and want to pass on to others.

Now I can post these observations on my blog.  Interested gardeners can subscribe to my blog by clicking the “sign me up!” button on the sidebar.  Don’t worry, you can easily unsubscribe.  Please comment on as many posts as you can so I know what you like and please recommend my blog to everyone you know.

Thanks, Carolyn

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