Why I Oughta...

We popped in to a few gardens around Ireland earlier this month (including St. Stephens Green that I posted about yesterday ) and saw a climate that seemed to grow a lot like ours.  With a little bit more tropical foliage than we can grow here.  Cape Cod garden vibes with the hydrangeas (especially the blue ones), but the Cape has way more Rhododendrons than Ireland. One of the stops was at Muckross House.  On the property is a walled garden named (naturally) Muckross Gardens .   There's an arboretum, some pruned shrubs, perennials and annual displays.   But, if you walk around the perimiter of the walled garden, you'll find something else:  espalier.  Apple trees trained into fan-shaped espalier held against the warm, stone walls of the garden.  I took a few photos and one of the things that I like about how they've pruned these is that they've seemingly thinned out the foliage in spots to show more branching followed by clusters (or cl...

At one of our stops on a recent trip to Ireland, we stayed near a mixed perennial garden that felt A LOT like our Zone 5b (or 6a) and included plant material that I've come across in some of the garden centers, big box stores and display gardens around the Chicago Suburbs.   In that garden, they used an upright, lime-green foliage shrub in a repetition across a long, linear bed that backs up to a hardscape patio.  The bed was more than one-hundred-feet-long and the gardener planted a series of upright Japanese-Maple-like bright green shrubs about ten-feet-apart.  Mixed in amongst the upright shrubs were hydrangeas and other perennials.  Below are a couple of photos showing these upright, lime-green shrubs in the garden bed: Here, below, is a closer-look at one of them: What are they?  Pretty sure, we're looking at Golden Tower Elderberry. From Wilson Brothers : A striking addition to the landscape, the Golden Tower Elderberry forms a tall, lush column of so...

I've lusted after the green Versailles Orangerie planter boxes that you see all over Paris filled with trees in gardens and parks.  I've posted about them a couple of times here on the blog and even thought about trying to make one on my own .  While were were trouncing around Paris this Summer, we certainly saw the original ones with upright wood slats.  But, I also was tuned into a new version: made from metal.   Here, below, is one of them I saw on a side street in Paris.  It has a scrubby tree/shrub in it, but feels fairly underplanted. And, below, are pair of them (unplanted as well) in the park leading to the Eiffel Tower.    A closer look inside these shows they are two-piece containers with an interior 'cage' that seems it can be 'lifted out' (see the corner hooks below).  I'm guessing that two-piece setup is intended for Winter as they can leave the planter in place, but take the tree to the Orangerie for overwintering.  The ot...

Here's #26 in the [ Coaster Collection ].  It is a Newcastle Brown Ale coaster that I picked up almost twenty years ago.  Yeah.  Seriously.  It was in a pile of stuff that I just went through that was from my post-graduation Europe trip.  For some reason, I brought this coaster home.  I'm using it on my desk at home right now, but as with most of these disposable coasters, they don't last long.   Hence, the chronicling of them here on the blog. 

Hey kids, look!  Rhein Falls! The largest 'plain' (whatever that means) waterfall in all of Europe .  And it happens to be in (or very near as far as I can tell) the very town that my sister and Equation Boy/Man are living.  My sister took us out there for a bit and we had quite the time.  We went on the little, flat bottomed boat and it got a bit hairy (at least for me) as the captain turned the boat sideways right INTO the current.  I could have sworn we were going to capsize and I held on for dear life.  I was quickly doing the mental math of which child to grab and as I looked around figuring out where the kids where, I quickly realized that all the rest of the tourists were acting naturally, smiling, taking photos of the grand falls.  And it was, sadly, just me freaking out about...apparently....nothing.