NOTE: You can send gardening questions to LittleBird Stephanie by putting them in a Comment to this column.
THIS IS my 12th column about the damn raccoon.
The first was in September of 2017, when the loathsome marauder eviscerated the fat, juicy pond…

Green Acre #206: The Predator Returns

WHY ANYONE would ask me questions about gardening, I don’t know. Have you noticed that I ditch any horticultural adventure that appears to be failing? Often, my best advice is for you to do so as well.
So I am startled to have received not one, not…

Green Acre #205: ‘Stephanie Gardens’ Answers Your Questions

LittleBird Stephanie’s quest began with a bottle of Seville orange fragrance imported from Spain. Back home the quest led to—where else?—the Internet.
BABY WENT to Spain last year, a time, you may recall, when people hopped on planes to places such…

Green Acre #204: Bitter(s) Gardens

THERE ARE ROSES in Baby’s garden: floribundas, hybrid teas, and scentless (but prolific) red Knock Outs. These have names like Fragrant Plum, Sunshine Happy Trails and Fun in the Sun, which is about as much fun in the sun as she’ll likely have in…

Green Acre #203: Rose Is a Rose Is a . . . Garden

THAT GREAT FAT white blossom on the new gardenia that I wrote (and wrote and wrote) about last week?
It did what it gardenia blossoms always do for me: fizzled and fell off like a little bird dying on a branch and falling flat to the ground, little…

Green Acre #202: Made for the Shade

THE NEW GARDENIA is about to bloom; one of the fat buds is ripening on the little bush. At least I assume it will bloom, though I do get into trouble assuming things. I buy a gardenia every year, it seems, and every year it up and dies, having done…

Green Acre #201: Her Garden Makes Scents

SUDDENLY IT’S summer. Thankfully, at least around Washington DC, the major gardening work has been done and what will be, will be. Well, in time we’ll find a number of things that didn’t do, that fizzled, dried up, performed in some unpleasing manner…

Green Acre #200: Who’s Poolin’ Who?

WE SOCIAL-DISTANCED dinner on the back porch with Judith and Robert last week. A bowl of taco chips and queso for them, sitting on the sofa, another for us, sitting in wicker chairs on the other side of the ottoman that serves as the coffee table. No…

Green Acre #199: We All Need a Porch Now

HORTENSE WAS fascinated by the annual Moving of the Plants. She was making dovish noises and tilting her head this way and that, red eyes wondering: Will I be next?
I spent a few moments contemplating the installation of a dovecote in the back…

Green Acre #198: The Moving of the Plants

‘WHEN YOU get dressed, could you come outside and help me with some plants?” My Prince asked. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon and I was still in my sleeping ensemble.
“I was just thinking about it,” I said. I’d been up since 6am and hadn’t quite…

Green Acre #197: Curb Your Plants

‘HOW MANY are too many chandeliers?” asked My Prince, admiring a new installation above the garden path.
This was a startling (and not particularly manly) question, I thought, though it gave me great ruffles of pleasure. “I don’t know, but we’ll find…

Green Acre #196:

AFTER 37 SUMMERS, the front yard is finally what one might call established—in great part thanks to having finally triumphed over the postal persons who for years trampled a path across the garden while talking (loudly) on their cell phones. Between…

Green Acre #195: Garden up Close, Mother’s Day From Afar

IT’S FUNNY to think that 40 years ago or so Washington’s National Arboretum was one of the least visited sights in the city. One could wander the 446-acre garden with its splendid roses, bonsai, hills blazing with azaleas, the dogwood grove, the…

Green Acre #194: Holy Roses

A IS FOR ASTER.
B is for begonia.
Lately I’m having trouble staying asleep. I nod off all right, but sometime around 4am I’m abruptly awake, listening for . . . something. There’s a lot of nothing out there. No cars. No horns. The birds are…

Green Acre #193: Gardening, A to Zzzzzz . . .

SNOW AT LAST!
It’s an inch or so deep in the backyard and pink as a ballerina’s tutu. The blossoms are falling from the Kwanzan cherry, covering the pond, the stone path, the flower borders. It’s gorgeous today, and will be tomorrow, but by the…

Green Acre #192: Rooting for Plants

HORTENSE WAS sitting on the floor in a corner of the solarium much of yesterday morning. There is nothing to see there, just the grayish-white molding and a scatter of potting soil. She had been sitting on a leaf of the bird of paradise earlier,…

Green Acre #191: Bird-Watching

CAUTION! Gallows humor ahead. Also, puns.
Dirt ain’t cheap. Say you want to construct your own hillock, or fill in a swimming pool (would that you could give that pool to me), or the base for some other Grand Scale Project. Nothing fancy required. No…

Green Acre #190: The Dirt on Dirt

I’VE BECOME newly creative in the kitchen. Living in the city, surrounded by markets and specialty food shops, whatever substance my stomach craves at any particular moment is usually within a 10-minute walk from home. I stop at one place for spices,…

Green Acre #189: These Roots Are Growing!

YOU THINK you have toilet paper trauma?
“It’s been a while since I thought about wiping my ass with leaves,” an ex-military pilot mused the other day.
He’s been through SERE training—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape—a course…

Green Acre #188: Real Green ‘Toilet Paper’

THE WASHINGTON POST’S Capital Weather Gang just announced that peak bloom for the Tidal Basin cherry blossoms has now been moved back five days to March 22nd—with one tree already fully flush with blossoms. If there’s anything positive to be said for…