About a month ago I was lucky enough to co-lead a garden-centric tour to Portugal & Galicia for The Hardy Plant Society of Oregon. HPSO has a robust garden-centric travel program, where the tours are often less expensive than similar options because the tour leaders do their work as volunteers. It was my first time doing a tour for HPSO (but not the last!), and…
Over this summer I was lucky enough to visit the garden of a blogger I’ve been following for a long time: Chickadee Gardens. I’d met the gracious and generous Tamara, one of the garden’s owners, previously and that just made me want to visit her garden more. Lovely people tend to make lovely gardens! It was a warm, clear summer day for a garden visit,…
Earlier this year I visited Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania with my mom, and I wrote a blog post about their various gardens. In addition to their gorgeous outdoor displays, there’s a conservatory there to rival any other that I’ve seen (and I’ve been to some good ones). Honestly, you could spend an entire day just visiting the conservatory gardens without seeing anything else! The conservatory…
I’m lucky to live in a city filled with wonderful gardeners, and my own neighborhood of southeast Portland is filled with some lovely gardens. When I walk the dogs, I plan my route based on what gardens I want to visit that day, and this last time I brought along my camera so I could show you some of my favorites along a particular route….
I recently spent some time on the east coast, and one of the things I did was meet up with my mom for a tour of some gardens just west of Philadelphia. We stayed near Media, PA, which is a cute suburban town where the outskirts have a distinctly rural feel. My mom and I share a love of gardening, so it was a great…
January is hard for me, and I know I’m not alone. The holidays are over, so there’s less distraction — fewer parties to give & attend, less champagne to drink, and the decorations (and especially lights) start to come down. And for someone who loves to garden, being stuck indoors because of weather, and limited daylight, takes its toll. So I do all the things…
In the first installment in this 3-post series, we visited the wonderful Danger Garden. And in part 2 we visited the beautiful xeric garden of Greg Shepherd, co-owner of Xera Plants. And in this final installment we’re visiting the inspirational garden of Lauren Hall-Behrens of Lillyvilla Gardens. This wasn’t the first time I’d visited Lauren’s garden, which I’d also seen featured in great books such as The…
In the first installment in this 3-post series, we visited the wonderful Danger Garden. This time, we’re visiting the beautiful garden of Greg Shepherd, co-owner of Xera Plants. I remember first learning of Xera after moving to Portland through their unique and wonderful plants stocked at both Portland Nursery and Garden Fever — they were often plants that were new to me, and they had…
My Dad & Stepmom are part of the annual snowbird migration to Florida, and I can’t think of a better place to get away to in the winter doldrums than South Florida. It’s not exactly easy to get there from here in the Pacific Northwest, but I finally made the journey and it was exactly the right thing to raise my spirits and Vitamin D…
I’m so lucky to have landed in Portland, Oregon as my home base. Not only is it a town filled with gardeners, but it’s a town filled with garden tours. One of the ones I look forward to each year is the Green on Green tour, which is a benefit for Albertina Kerr; who provide programs and services to children and adults with developmental disabilities and mental…
I’m very lucky to live in Portland, Oregon, where there are beautiful gardens everywhere. Really, everywhere! And there are great organizations here that allow you to tour lots of them, like the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon, which issues a booklet to its members with dozens gardens open throughout most of the growing season. And anybody can become a member for just $35/year. I’ve seen…
In September last year my mom & I visited the Oregon Garden in Silverton, OR. It’s 80 acres and was opened in 1999. It was truly inspirational for me as that’s around the same time as I created my own garden. I’ll get to the plantings and design in a minute, but first I want to tell you that one of the purposes of the…
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