Content
A trip to Memphis, Tennessee is not complete unless you gather at the grand Peabody Hotel around 4:00 pm to get a front row seat in the resplendent lobby for the Duck March. There is a balcony overlooking the “parade” if you are a late arriver. The anticipation builds as the “Duck Master” tells the […]
“Notes from Wood and Fallow” a column in Country Life in America, Volume I, a magazine for the Home-Maker, the Vacation-seeker, The Gardener, the Farmer, the Nature-Teacher, the Naturalist by L.H. Bailey, Editor, November, 1901 to April 1902, titles “Goldenrod, Queen of the American Garden.” Also known as solidago, it is a native plant that […]
Cheekwood’s 55 acre gardens lie to the west of Nashville, TN and were originally designed by New York residential and landscape architect, Bryant Fleming for Leslie and Mabel Cheek. They were completed in 1932. In the 1950s, their daughter Huldah Cheek Sharp and husband Walter, donated the estate to become a botanical garden and […]
Intuition told us to stay at a bed and breakfast when we recently visited Asheville, North Carolina. It proved right. The turn of the century Victorian and Arts and Crafts homes reflect the great detail the craftsmen, many of whom helped to build the Biltmore, the home of George and Edith Vanderbilt, employed to embellish […]
Frederick Law Olmsted was very pleased when George Vanderbilt hired him to design the landscape of his new home, the Biltmore in Asheville, a project Olmsted began in 1892. Olmsted was nationally known for his work in the public sector and the occasion to work on such a large scale, 125,000 acres in the western […]
The following article is from the www.biltmore.com website. Olmsted’s Vision When George Vanderbilt decided to make Western North Carolina his home, the Biltmore Estate, he hired the founding father of American landscape architecture—Frederick Law Olmsted—to design the grounds. Olmsted’s vision for Biltmore included a small pleasure ground and garden, a major arboretum and nursery, and […]
The Page-Rollins White Garden is a redesign of a preexisting White Garden at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens explains Jason Holmes, Curator, Doris Duke Center Gardens. The white garden is based in part on one of the most famous gardens in England, Sissinghurst, and will be completed by Spring, 2012. The designers and gardeners of […]
In the early 1930s, Dr. Frederic M. Hanes, a pathologist, neurologist and chair of the Department of Medicine at Duke University, saw promise in a debris-filled and overgrown ravine that he passed as he walked to work each day. In 1934, Hanes – who was in many ways the first director of development for Duke […]
A garden friend gave me this small plant several years ago. I didn’t know what it was and neither did she. It came from her friend’s garden. I planted it in full sun in the back of the garden so in the event I didn’t like it, no big deal. It came up the following […]
This is the view from Miss Elizabeth Lawrence’s desk. The following excerpt is from her book, Gardens in Winter: “I am writing, as always, of my own garden which I see, whenever I look up from my work, everyday in the year—never without pleasure, and seldom without seeing something in bloom. But I am not […]
Warren H. Manning came from a New England family, a family with a strong horticultural background. According to Robin Karson in her book, A Genius for Place, published by University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Library of American Landscape History, his father, Jacob Warren Manning, was considered, “the dean of the nursery trade […]
Allen Lacy, author of The Gardener’s Eye, published in 1992 by the Atlantic Monthly Press, writes that Congress made a terrible mistake in choosing the rose instead of the yucca as the nation’s floral emblem. Gertrude Jekyll, the English gardener, listed it as one of her favorite plants. Native Americans used it to make sandals […]
