Sorry for the alliteration. Couldn’t help it. Like many other gardeners, I’ve discovered the amazing energy created when you pair a purple/burgundy foliage plant with one that sports that bright greenish yellow color we either love or hate: chartreuse. Never one to go half measures, I decided to apply this color scheme to my ENTIRE…
As someone who hates to eat mushrooms, I surprise myself by being kind of fascinated with these fungi. I think it’s because I associate them with fairies, gnomes, and pixies, my favorite forest dwellers. It’s certainly not the fact that they are associated with male virility because of the phallic shape, ugh. Nope, for me,…
Look at this little pile of kitty love!!! These are three of the foster kittens we had last year. Happily, they were all adopted, yay. Sometimes people don’t want to adopt black cats for fear that they bring bad luck. I can tell you that this is ridiculous. Black cats have the best personalities and…
This is the time of year when I really begin dreaming about warm weather and spring and sunshine and flowers and getting back into the garden. Plant catalogs are rolling in to tempt me with new cultivars, seed packets are showing up in stores, and gardening is just around the corner. One of my wish…
Imagine my shock when I saw a fire-engine red lizard face sticking out of my rock wall in the garden. I yelled for my husband: “There’s a giant salamander out here!” Because of course I know we don’t have lizards in Delaware. Salamanders, however, are a different matter. I see them all the time in…
These two precious kittens ignore their hundreds of dollars of cat toys and play in a shipping box.
Meet Yolanda, our backyard raccoon. She lives in a strip of woods behind our house that is owned by the county, so her actual home tree is not in our backyard, but we like to think she is ours, partly because of her many foraging trips to our yard. Her tree is a larger tree…
The American Eastern Yellow Fly Agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria var. guessowii) appear during periods of high humidity in our conifer forests, often growing under white pine or eastern hemlock trees. It’s characterized by white gills and stem, a white spore print, warts on the cap which easily wash or rub off, a membranous partial veil…
Take a tour through these beautiful winter containers below:
The northern green frog (Rana clamitans melanota) is a subspecies of the green frog, Rana clamitans. Native to the eastern United States, it is a common aquatic frog that never strays far from the water, except during hibernation. It lives freshwater marshes, swamps, lakes, ponds and the banks of rivers. “They occupy a wide variety…
