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...

On my walk back to the train at Union Station, I wandered through the riverwalk plaza at Riverside Plaza.  There are a pair of companion buildings at 10 and 120 S. Riverside Plaza that have been going through a renovation of both their interiors (I think) and their exterior/outside plaza spaces .  The riverwalk portion appears to have wrapped up last Fall and was planted before Winter.   The space is a series of linear, raised beds.  And certainly feels like they've taken some inspiration from places like the Highline - that have a more linear nature.   The beds don't have any trees (unlike the Highline), but are multi-level raised beds full of perennials.  I'm pretty sure this area gets full mid-day sun, but due to the tall buildings all around, is probably in the shade in the morning and later in the afternoon. What jumped out to me this week were the dormant grasses in the bed.  There were A LOT of them.  Planted in a mass.  And....

Just a little bit over a week ago, I shared ANOTHER 1 post about the trees that I saw in Tokyo and talked about how I'm in the middle of a bit of a crush on Japanese horticulture.  That crush certainly is most-focused on trees (both deciduous and coniferous) that are typically columnar in shape, but it also extends to gardens in general.  This post is about a little hidden garden called the Gotenyama Garden that is right outside the Tokyo Marriott in Shinagawa.  The same place that had that epic honeycomb setup I shared back in July . The Cherry Blossom tree that I included in a post with some Nagoya-area trees back in April of this year is from the very top of Gotenyama Garden, but that was as far as I was able to *get* to in the garden on my previous trip.  Just a quick step outside to grab a photo.  This time, I was able to wander in there a bit further.  And it is pretty great! Starting with the image you see at the top that shows one of the ...