The first time I tried to grow sunflowers, I started them on the kitchen windowsill in March. By the third week they were two feet tall, leaning sideways like drunk teenagers, and the moment I planted them outside they basically…
The first lavender I planted, I treated like a celebrity. I watered it every few days. I top-dressed the bed with the same bark mulch I used for the hydrangeas. I gave it compost in spring like I gave everything…
I fell in love with weeping trees at a botanical garden. That cascading form, branches sweeping toward the ground, everything around it suddenly looking more intentional. Then I went home and measured my yard. No room for a 40-foot weeping…
My three-year-old picked our first dahlia tuber off the garden center shelf because it looked, and I’m quoting her, “like a dead potato with spider legs.” She was right. It did.
When I was seven, my grandmother had a strip of poppies along the side of her house that I was convinced were magic. Paper-thin petals in orange and red, and every time the wind hit them they looked like they…
I killed my first batch of snapdragon seedlings with a heat mat. Set the tray on it like I do with tomatoes and peppers, walked away, came back to nothing. Not a single sprout. Turns out, snapdragons are the opposite…
We didn’t buy this house for the garden. We bought it because it was the only thing we could afford with enough space for a growing family, and it happened to come with a yard.
I spent my first summer weeding the strip between the sidewalk and the fence. Every weekend. Down on my knees, pulling crabgrass and dandelions from bare soil that grew weeds faster than I could remove them.
The north side of our house gets maybe two hours of sun on a good day. I planted three astilbes there my first spring, expecting the fluffy pink plumes from the tag photo.
The redbud at the end of our street blooms before anything else wakes up. Pink flowers straight out of bare bark, no leaves yet, just color against gray sky.
