In a post earlier this winter, I lamented the demise of four amaryllis bulbs I had carefully nursed along for a year.

Here’s how three of them looked last fall, just before I brought them indoors.

And in January, when I gave them up for dead.

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The Native Plant Center at Westchester Community College in Valhalla is hosting its annual spring conference on Thursday. I went for a couple of the lectures last year and they were suburb.

Here’s info straight from them:

“The Native Plant Center (NPC), which is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a number of special events and programs, is sponsoring a Spring conference on Thursday, March 20. Read more of this entry »

In some winters, ‘Winter King’ hawthorn trees will hold onto their luscious red berries well into March.

Apparently, birds don’t much care for the berries and wait until late winter when other more favored food sources are long gone.

Winter also highlights this tree’s lovely gray and brown exfoliating bark and silver-gray stems.

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The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills is hosting a free lecture on the effects of global warming on farming in our area.

Here are the details:

“Farming in a Changing Climate: Cynthia Rosenzweig
Saturday 3/29/2008 1:00 PM
We’re so pleased to welcome Cynthia Rosenzweig – senior scientist for NASA’s Goddard Institute & co-chair of the International Panel on Climate Change – for our next installment of a year-long series, Farming in a Changing Climate. Cynthia will focus on the effects of global warming on the agriculture of our region. Don’t miss this important event!

Click here for more info and to register.

“Coming soon:
Sheep Shearing Weekend
4/5/2008 – 4/6/2008 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Swine School
4/18/2008 – 4/19/2008

Recognizing that true garden antiques have become well beyond the reach of most homeowners, Barbara Israel of Katonah has launched a new line of high-quality reproductions.

Here’s a Dorset Maiden from the line, modeled after an English original, circa 1880:

The first shipment of these newly cast stone ornaments — statues, benches, birdbaths, lions, finials, fountains and pedestals — arrived earlier this month at Mariani Gardens in Armonk. Read more of this entry »

As anyone within earshot of my desk well knows, I hate the month of March in New York and the rest of the Northeast.

I grew up in Louisville, then went to Duke and lived in Durham, NC, for a couple of years. In the South, March means spring at full bore — dogwoods, daffodils, azaleas, something newly in bloom every day.

But in New York? Soggy lawns and garden beds, mud, dirty leftover snow and WIND, my least favorite weather element.

So… I felt a field trip to the annual Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden was in order.

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Yuccas are seriously tough plants: drought tolerant, disease and pest resistant (including deer) and happy in just about any soil you throw at them.

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Rose-planting season is still many weeks away, but winter is a good time to poke around and see what’s on the market this year.

Wholesale growers have been bringing lots more low-maintenance, long-blooming roses to retail markets. One of the better brands is the Easy Elegance collection of no-fuss roses from Bailey Nurseries, a St. Paul, Minn., operation.

Super Hero, a new deep-red stunner in the collection, looks like a surefire winner for spring.

Along with the everblooming red flowers, this caped crusader offers medium to dark green foliage that should withstand the heat and humidity of Hudson Valley summers.This hybrid tea-shaped floribunda rose is as easy to grow as any other shrub, Bailey says. However, many gardeners in the Northeast consider roses to be a very expensive annual. Read more of this entry »

Yup, we’ve got them. As I mentioned in a post last week, we’re switching to a new administrator for our blogs. Our systems folks expected some glitches along the way and indeed we have them: missing photos and video segments, posts out of order, sidebars not showing up etc. etc.

Please be patient. They hope to get everything resolved this week.

If you’re working in Safari and photos aren’t showing up, try looking at the site through Foxfire.

I keep hearing good things about Doug Tallamy’s new book, “Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens” (Timber Press, Nov. 2007).

Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, will be the keynote speaker at an environmental symposium tomorrow night (Tuesday, March 11) at the Greenwich, Conn., public library. It starts at 6:30 pm. Read more of this entry »