Posts by Jenks Farmer
Fall Garden Visiting Slide Show
November has been a busy time with garden visiting and talking and trading plants and such. Here’s a little slide show of a few of the gardens we’ve visited. We’re still dividing plants, no it’s not too cold. But next week is sharing time again; on Monday, Bob Polomski & Jenks talk about Deep Rooted…
Read MoreFlorence Museum
Take a few minutes to enjoy progress and planting at the new The Florence Museum, where I was asked to create an organic, free form garden in a huge rectangular courtyard which is surrounded by rectangular buildings. And, where the plants all have ties to the geographical origins of items in the museum collection! It’s…
Read MoreWhy We Grow Our Own; Old Way Just Works Better for Propagating Crinum Lilies
Oh Man That Hurts! Two years of cultivation and care and now we have to dump all of these crinum lily bulbs. Why? Because the person I bought them from sold them as one thing, but in actuality, they are a mix of colors and habits of growth. Since they were tiny products of a…
Read MoreField Notes Fall Garden Work (on the Lily Farm)
A friend sent this text the other day, “can I be honest u need to write more about gardening n less about strolling w old guys.” Just like that; he didn’t wait for me to answer the can i be honest part….. But here goes. What I do in the dirt is a friggin’ lot…
Read MorePeople Who Show Us The World
In 1938 Buzzy’s second grade teacher made his class listen to Wagner and walk through gardens of neighborhood ladies and gentlemen. Some of the boys sneered. Buzzy, always sensitive , pretty much shocked me when he said, “Once or twice, on the playground, I found the boys who laughed and interrupted and I, (he whispers…
Read MoreEmphisis on Visiting
From the minute we knocked on her door, we laughed. I took a friend from up north to visit a friend in Georgia last week. Ostensibly, we went to see her garden. We knocked, she greeted. But since we were a few minutes early she said, “Walk around the front garden and I’ll be right…
Read MoreGreat Dixter Was the Bait
The lectures by Great Dixter gardener were colorful and almost sales-force energetic but the real fun of Grower Great Gardeners symposium was the concentration of cool people. My two favorite conversations of the day are below. For all the successes of this fundraiser (for Spartanburg Community College in SC and Great Dixter Garden in southern…
Read MoreSeeds Are Still Free — At the Moment
My donkey and I have been doing this week what men and donkeys have been doing for millennia. We’ve been planting seeds. In doing that, we carry on our backs (ok that’s an exaggeration and the pic is set up) one of the basic freedoms, the truths, rights and pillars of all civilization. That’s not…
Read MoreTithonia – An Old Fashion Flower You Only Buy Once
Henry Mitchell wrote about Tithonia; you can’t really see the flowers in the summer because it gets so tall but after autumn rains, after a hurricane wind, it falls over, lays on the ground and you can finally enjoy the flowers. I love him. Tithonia, in the picture below, seeds itself in every year, grows…
Read MoreDeep Rooted in a Tiny New Orleans Garden
It’s probably true for something you do in your life, some hobby or task: little things, intricate things take more time to plan and are harder to get right than big things. In planning little gardens, every piece has to fit perfectly. Nature’s complexity is less forgiving and more visible in miniature. A plant that…
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