Hortisma

hortisma: n

1. a special personal quality or power of a garden making it capable of influencing or inspiring large numbers of people
2. a quality inherent in a garden which inspires great enthusiasm and devotion

Examples of its use in a sentence:

The Lurie Garden in Chicago had a special hortisma about it that caused people to visit there many times on a single visit to Chicago.

Or

Her

Achieving Happiness In Your Garden: The Sixth Secret

I'll admit I was excited when I learned that there were several more secrets to achieving happiness in your garden other than first five secrets I had discovered so long ago. I was on high alert. I wanted to find these new secrets, wherever they were and whatever they were, as fast I could grow radishes in the springtime.

Every day as I tended the garden, I looked for stray scraps of paper

Garden Design - Best thing I ever did

The best thing I ever did for my garden was to hire a garden designer to plan out the overall design.

The worst thing I did was wait 13 years from the time I moved to this property until I hired the garden designer.

It wasn't easy to give up that control I thought I had in my garden, to admit that I needed help on design.

After all, I'm a gardener.  I know the basics.  Big plants go behind

August Dreams Border

And the answer for what will be planted in the East Perennial Border lies in the working name I have given it…

August Dreams Border.

It will be planted with various perennials, bulbs, and grasses so that its crescendo will occur in autumn, with a nice build up starting in August. There will be little hints of color through the spring and early summer, but not enough to take away from the West

Garden Design Update: Choices

There is a new perennial border in the garden, where before there was lawn. For lack of a more descriptive name, the garden designer currently calls it  "East Perennial Border" because it is on the east side of the garden.

On the west side of the garden there is another perennial border that we call  "West Perennial Border".

Both will end up with new names at some point, when their form,

Garden Design Update: Time to Plant

Callicarpa dichotoma 'Early Amethyst'
Remember June, when it rained so much that it seemed like the garden would be a jungle by mid-summer?

My spring planted landscape plants got plenty of water through the third wettest June in Indianapolis history.

Back then, I wondered if the "patio guys" would have rain delays like my two nephews who had worked every morning through June hauling mulch,

Garden Design Element: Garden Song

Every garden has its own song.

In my garden, the corn stalks long ago dried up but I like to leave them standing so I can listen to the rustling sound they make when the wind blows one stalk against the other.

Elsewhere in the garden, I can hear the birds calling out to one another – cardinals, robins, goldfinches and all kinds of other birds that I don’t know all that well. They often start

Another Garden Design Element Discovered: Horttery

Mystery! Intrigue! What is down there?

Down there is yet another garden design element that I want to find in my garden.

This particular grate at the Dallas Arboretum most likely functions as a place for water to run off the path into an underground network of pipes that take the water off to a nearby lake.

A good solid explanation - functional, rational, simple enough.

Or perhaps it is

A Path

A path through a future woodland garden...

Imagine it with more plants...

Little tiny plants that make you want to bend over and see them more closely.

Bigger plants that hide the curve a bit and make you want to see what is at the other end.

Close your eyes and imagine...

Walking down the path in the early morning through the dappled shade.

Ambling down the path in the twilight, with just

Garden Design Elements: Seasonal-shift

I find it very confusing to be in a garden where plants are blooming everywhere you look and there is no place to rest your eyes without seeing something else that screams out to be seen or if you do stop and look at one bloom you have this feeling that you are missing something or not looking at the right plant as if all the flowers you aren’t looking at are tapping you on the shoulder and

Garden Design Update: Need To Mull, Soon

Garden designs, as it turns out, often take a break in the summer time, or at least mine is.

My last assignment from the garden designer for the garden design was to mull over a list of suggestions she sent me for the backyard borders and give her some feedback.

That was a month ago, and from then until now, we've had very little rain and it has been very very hot, so mulling has been difficult

Garden Design Update: Garden Gate

I've always liked the idea of entering the vegetable garden via a gate.

With a gate, the garden feels more like an enclosure, a sanctuary, a quiet retreat separate from the rest of the yard.  I imagined opening the gate, going into the garden, and having the gate close behind me, as though I'd entered a room. 

With my vegetable garden already surrounded on three sides by a privacy fence, and

As The Garden Design Continues...

As the garden design continues…

This week, the garden designer sent me a map of the backyard with the provisional names of each garden area noted on it, and a bulleted list of the ideas and suggestions she has for each of these garden areas.

I now get to mull over the ideas and send her back comments and questions.

The reason she named each area of the garden is so that as we talk through the

Is A Garden Complete Without A Water Feature?

Is a garden ever complete without a water feature? Goodness, no.

So I’m now looking for a new water feature, most likely a fountain of some kind, to add to my garden and new patio, to help complete it.

But after looking at fountains for sale at several local garden centers and scrolling through numerous websites featuring hundreds of fountains online, I don’t think I’ve quite yet found my new

Garden Design Update: Dust On The Hydrangeas By The New Patio

Pardon the dust on the hydrangeas, but the "patio guys" cut a lot of pavers to create this work of art that I call "the new patio" and it kicked up quite a bit of dust.

But now they are done and I have a new patio to enjoy.

Remember the patio that was there before? It was a weedy mess almost from tthe day they installed it.
This looks a little worse than normal because I had already started to

Garden Design Update: Pruning Up

The garden designer and her partner, the hort-abler, returned one evening late this past week to survey the back yard and discuss “what next” in my garden design process.

“What next” included a suggestion to prune one of the viburnums, Viburnum prunifolium, so that it would be more like a small tree instead of a massive shrub. I was delighted to take on that little assignment. I love to prune

Bluebirds and Other Visitors In My Garden

It’s been a good week in the garden, graced, even momentarily, by a pair of bluebirds.

I don’t know much about birds, but I believe that there are more birds in my garden now that I’m working with a garden designer and making a few changes around this place. Even later in the evening after seeing the bluebirds, I opened the back door just as a big hawk, maybe a Cooper’s hawk, landed in a nearby

I named another garden

When the garden designer laid out the gardens a few springs ago, she described the bed around the locust tree as a "groundcover quilt". 

What I recall from her description is that it should be a calm sea of greens and  because it was by the patio, it would be filled with low growing plants that would not obstruct the view of the rest of the garden.

As with the other gardens laid out by the

Wildflower Wednesday: Monarda

Monarda ‘Petite Delight’ has a few things to get off her petals. Management at May Dreams Gardens is not responsible for nor necessarily agrees with the statements and opinions of this plant.

“Hello… is this keyboard working? It is? Okay. Well now, we, Monarda ‘Petite Delight’, have just a few things to say.

First of all, we were totally, unjustly and without second thought passed over for

Dear Friends and Gardeners: June 21, 2010

Dear Dee and Mary Ann and Gardening Friends Everywhere,

I’m writing a bit later than usual this week. Been busy. Out in the garden. Out and about.

I’ve taken on a new rallying call… Carpe Hortus. Seize the garden. Go for it. Plant it, pull it, hoe it, do it. And that’s what I’m doing.

Out in the vegetable garden, everything is growing well, partly or mostly due to all the rain we’ve gotten.