Snips & Tips - ONCE UPON A CONEFLOWER

Art from the Garden

Making art from the garden, whether it’s crafts like wreaths and dried arrangements, painting “en plein air” or drawing botanical sketches, it’s always fun and a great way to preserve garden memories.

I want to stress, you don’t need lots of talent to do this. Art can be enjoyable no matter what your level of artistic acumen. The idea is to try a new fun activity with the breeze in your hair. Even doodles or sketches in a writing journal count. Capture some flowering trees in spring, paint an Adirondack chair among the daylilies, draw a vase of daisies; they all make fine subjects.

Silver in the Garden

One of the most useful colors in any garden is silver. Aside from white, no other color produces such a strikingly pale neutral that coordinates with virtually everything. Silver defines boundaries and balances color. It helps anchor a garden through strong contrast and visual buoyancy. It can even sit quietly in the background and let everything else shine.

Excluding metal objects, when we say “silver” in gardening terms we mean living foliage with a silvery bloom or cast. The color isn’t metallic, obviously. “Silver” foliage is closer to gray, powder blue, sea-glass green or pistachio, often with white fuzz. A few flowers can also pass as silver. All are valuable to the gardener for their high-contrast properties. In both very low and very strong light, these cultivars often reflect a silvery or pale countenance, hence the term “silver”.

Lovage: An Under-utilized Perennial Herb

A clouded sulphur butterfly with lovage umbels and coneflowers

If you’ve never tasted the herb lovage, it’s time to remedy that situation. But you won’t find it on the spice shelf at the supermarket; you’ll have to grow it yourself. Or, find a friend who does. Fortunately, lovage is a big, easy-care perennial herb that will produce armfuls of leaves and seeds for your table with almost no work from you.

Better known in Europe for its culinary value than here, lovage has been in continual cultivation since Roman times and was part of every medieval kitchen garden. It’s popular in broths, soups, salads, pickles, seafood dishes and more. In Ukraine it was once considered an aphrodisiac and even used as a hair rinse! Time to try it for yourself, especially if you like to cook.