Garden Journal

These adorable little drought-tolerant and deer-resistant bulbs are an early favorite in my garden, arriving with the scilla, a little after snowdrops begin. Before they open, the bulbs look like colorful spearheads; then they bloom just like larger irises, generally in shades of blue accented with yellow. (They’re not scented, unlike some of the large […]

Scilla makes a haze of green and blue in the garden in early spring, and looks lovely alongside white-blooming hellebores. It spreads in our region, but fairly slowly in my experience — it takes several decades to form a sizeable colony. There are a few homes in southeast Oak Park where scilla is planted all

Most of my hellebores are still budding, rather than blooming, but they’re starting to pop now. Give them a week! That purple one on the right is big enough to divide, so I’ll be digging it up later in the season, dividing it in two, and replanting in two different spots. In theory, division is

Yesterday, I uncovered and cleaned up my irises. Irises were my favorite flower as a kid, mostly because I had a paper craft kit that let you make various flowers, and the irises, with their complex structure, were both tricky to do and very satisfying to complete. So when we bought our house, I knew

I know for many people, their garden doesn’t really wake up until mid-April, but I am too impatient to wait for that. If you’re dying for flowers as early as possible, snowdrops and hellebores are your friends. Part of what is so great about both is for people who have heavy shade and have a

One of the key gardening elements that it took me something like 8 years to actually get into my head is the distinction between shrubs and vines that bloom on new wood vs. old wood. This is SUPER-IMPORTANT for pruning, and it’s why whenever you buy a shrub or vine, you should at least jot

Yesterday, I took 20 minutes to prune my Annabelle hydrangea. Annabelle is a popular cultivar of our Illinois native smooth hydrangea aborescens, a hardy mophead with huge, heavy heads of blooms that offers a beautiful cloud of white for months in June and July. It prefers part-shade but can tolerate full sun happily (with good

I love this transitional time, when I can appreciate the last of the winter light on the dried flower heads, and also uncover the newly emerging flowers — periwinkle / vinca minor, hellebores, snowdrops. I’m pretty sure I have some winter aconite (bright yellow tiny bulb) in the backyard; hope to uncover it this weekend.

This is your annual reminder that even though it’s snowing today after a warm spell, all your early spring flowers will be fine. The snowdrops will be fine. The viburnum buds will be fine. The little daffodil and tulip shoots you see peeping up will be fine. If it were a really hard and extended

It’s gorgeous outside today, and there’s lots of outside tasks to do, not to mention that I have a host of seedlings to transplant, but apparently my brain decided that today was the day I would plant up the terrarium my in-laws bought me for my Christmas present, so here we are. (Thanks, Ann Whyte!)