WELCOME!

As an organic-only gardener, designer, lecturer, and author, I created this blog to shares my decades of experience and advice with new and seasoned gardeners.

Categories will be created and searching will be available for you to find what interests you – planning and planting a vegetable garden, rooftop gardening, planting bulbs, starting seeds, creating a community garden, composting tips, etc.

Gardens and gardeners evolve. A move from Manhattan to Garrison in 2006 found me sharing gardening beds and an organic herb farm with deer, turkey, fox, and coyotes. My education and happy addiction to research found me attending a Whitetail deer course and becoming a certified Deer Steward from the Quality Deer Management Association.

My quarter-acre property in the Hudson Valley of New York State is my library, teacher, and canvas that is filled with shrubs, trees, perennials, vines, raised beds and containers, a hedgerow of viburnums and evergreens, and with a woodland area, rock garden, pond and stream. I grow vegetables, herbs, wildflowers, and have a stand of ferns, a thyme lawn, and pollinator-friendly ornamental plants – – and all organic so nesting birds and visiting wildlife is safe and very welcomed.

“There is history every place you stand” is my oft-repeated quote since it is true. I have designed public gardens that reflect what happened there: Immigrants Gifts – where thousands left ships but could not take precious seeds from their homelands ashore, species from Gen. Garrit Striker’s 1800’s rose and orchard garden still thrive in today’s DeWitt Clinton Park, and a Revolutionary War-era kitchen and medicinal garden at the Van Wyck Homestead that had been the headquarters of the Fishkill Supply Depot.

Having always been drawn to know the geological history, who actually lived there, I have always incorporated the past into garden designs. In 2018, was named a Harrison Fellow, after attending the Historic Landscape Institute at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Look to what has grown and what is thriving where you live – – native plants and those that have adapted will take little if any maintenance. Keep a list of what wildlife visit and raise their young on your property so that you can grow plants for their continued survival.

Gardening is so healing, delicious, beautiful, and fun!

Yours Sincerely,

Barbara

29 October 2021
Hyde Park, New York, USA

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