SprottHaus: A Gardener's Journey

I don't make personal New Year's resolutions anymore.  I used to, but I never was very good with the whole self discipline thing, so my "new and improved" habits didn't tend to last much more than a couple of weeks or a month.  Maybe two. In more recent years, I found myself making mental promises (okay, resolutions ) to remember to do all-the-things-you-should-be-doing-in-your-garden-at-the-proper-time... not for my own garden, but for Elizabeth Lawrence's, of which I was primary caretaker from November 2010 through March 2024. I must admit that I did a better job of keeping those resolutions than any I'd made for myself personally, but there were always tasks that fell through the cracks or were forgotten.  For a long time, I carried the foggy weight of guilt of those discarded good intentions.  That is, until I read this: "This January, I have added a new resolution to the old promises to get behind my garden sins; the new one is to take time to e...

Every year I eagerly await the first bloom scape of Lycoris , yet I am inevitably taken by surprise when it appears.  It is so appropriate that the common name for this genus is "surprise lily".  I have several types and varieties of Lycoris planted throughout our garden.  This may or may not be because they are pretty well dead easy to grow: average garden soil in part sun to part shade, in a place where they don't completely bake or get bone dry.  The season starts in early July with L. x squamigera .  (I know, it's a mouthful.  I say it "lye-KORR-is skwah-MIG-er-uh.") L. x squamigera begins the season of Lycoris . Up to November 2010, I knew nothing of this troupe of fascinating amaryllids.  That's when I entered Elizabeth (Libba) Lawrence's world, and she began teaching me (through her writings and her garden) that I had a LOT more to learn about plants.  This was especially true of bulbs.  In 2011, when I picked up her classic The Lit...