THERE MAY BE no moment in the year when my friend Ken Druse and I are more grateful for the range of textures and colors of foliage we made room for in our gardens than we are right now – in the hottest stretch of summer days when spring’s nonstop flower show is just a distant memory. Ken and I spoke recently about planning, and planting, for strong visual interest even in th...

GEORGE SCHOELLKOPF returned from a 1979 trip visiting English gardens inspired to do some garden-making of his own. His canvas was a Northwestern Connecticut hillside and not the Cotswolds, and the home he just purchased wasn’t a grand manor house, but a simple 18th-century farmhouse. Nevertheless, George brought the feel of an English garden to life at the place that became ...

A COUPLE OF RAVENS have been shouting at each other across the garden each day this spring-into-summer, and their loud-mouthed antics reminded me of a somewhat less bawdy conversation about crows and ravens that I had a decade ago on the podcast with ornithologist Dr. John Marzluff—a conversation I want to reprise. Possessing large brains for their body size, a knack for soci...

A BIG OLD copper beech tree is a focal point of my garden, and each time I look out the window at it admiringly these days, I feel the same love and gratitude I always have for its grandeur, but also a deepening twinge of worry. These are increasingly tough times for beeches, both European ones like my copper beech, and on a far bigger environmental scale, the precious native...

WE’RE GOING TO do some pruning, but not the same old straight-forward kind. Instead we’re going to talk topiary, and its transformative powers—not just on the plant that is the subject that’s getting clipped, or on the garden that the living sculpture will eventually adorn, but potentially on the creator, too. Topiary artist Mike Gibson and I talked about the horticulture and...