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Showing posts with the label garden advice

Harry Lauder's Walking Stick Tree Planted: July 2020

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The story of our contorted tree starts with a trip to Phantom Manor in Disneyland Paris back in the Summer of 2019 .  Nat and I spent a day there during our visit and we were both struck by the trees and foliage that the Imagineers planted and nurtured around their Haunted Mansion.  The queue is outdoor like at WDW, but it winds through a garden full of weeping and contorted trees and shrubs.  It gives off quite a look - one of decay, dying and ill-looking horticulture.  Based on that trip, I included the idea of buying a 'contorted tree' on my 2020 to-do list .  #13 on the list was to buy a weeping or contorted tree .  I suppose that I could have crossed that off my list when I bought the tiniest of tiny contorted trees online this Spring with my small Cortorted Hortsmann Recursive Larch .  But, I couldn't stop at one contorted tree.  So, when we were doing a "drive through" nursery run to the Growing Place during the early stages of Covid quarantine and s

He Who Plants An Oak Looks Forward To Future Ages, And Plants For Posterity.

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Right at the end of August, I posted a few photos showing some tree damage that occurred up in Twin Lakes Wisconsin including a felled giant, massive, hundreds of years old Oak tree.  In poking around trying to find information about Oaks in Wisconsin, I found this DNR publication called "Every Root An Anchor: Wisconsin's Famous and Historic Trees" .  I haven't gotten through much of the book just yet, but I was struck by a few quotes that they included in the preamble.  The first of which is this quote from Washington Irving in Forest Trees .  The idea of someone planting oak trees as a person who is looking out into the future - not for themselves - but for others.  Their children.  Future generations.  That's kinda interesting. I've planted plenty of trees on our property in Downers Grove these past few years, but NONE of them have been Oak trees. But you know what?  We're the benefactors of someone who lived into this Washington Irving quote.

Gardening Advice From Ralph Snodsmith

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In this piece on Garden Design that lays out eight landscape design principles, there are some things that I found interesting and wanted to share here.  Both for you, my dear reader, but also so I remember them.  To start, I thought I'd go with the final one on *their* list.  It was this final one  that caught my attention.  This little nugget is from a guy named  Ralph Snodsmith who hosted a radio show about gardening in New York .  I'm sure he imparted quite a bit of knowledge to his listeners/callers, but it seems that he had one statement that stood above the rest.  This certainly feels like something I need to remind myself when I'm out in the garden: "It’s better to plant a 50-cent plant in a $5 hole, than a $5 plant in a 50-cent hole." The Garden Design piece goes on to say that there's no greater planting wisdom than this.  Hole preparation, especially for folks like me who, due to new construction, have a clay layer that is in many of the bed