Garden Smackdown™ by Andrew Keys

Pink Flamingo

April 25, 2012

One of my earliest posts here was a wishlist post about this crazy tree. I never really thought I’d find a place for it, or that it would find its way to me.

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Krabi, Thailand, 2008—But wait, before we go there, we have to visit where I grew up, which would be rural south Mississippi, U.S., 1978-1997—A common custom for young men there is hunting, heretofore referred to as huntin’. I never cared for huntin’, but I DID love wild animals. Still do. Especially live ones, but taxidermied [...]

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Don’t Eat the View

April 12, 2012

Photo: Plant Pictures || You know, I hate to say it, but I don’t often think of the children. This time I did! My picket fence cried out for a vine. It borders the sidewalk along our street, always abuzz with both footed and treaded varieties of traffic in the center of this little town. [...]

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A Shrine Design Slideshow

April 10, 2012

For the longest, I fixated on our front door. How to frame it juuuuuuust right? Like all my gardens’s other vignettes, I let it grow and evolve organically (figuratively, though literally too), but its “YES!” moment lingered just outside my consciousness for years. It looked so familiar, what I was doing there. Then I saw [...]

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An Ode to Helen the Conqueror

April 4, 2012

Among the workhorses in my garden, Helen von Stein is a workaholic. Who is Helen anyway? In my garden, Helen is a vigorous, large-leaved cultivar of lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina), with various noms des plumes: ‘Helen von Stein,’ ‘Helene von Stein,’ ‘Countess Helen von Stein,’ the most fascinating ‘Countess Helen von Stein Zeppelin,’ and the [...]

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Garden Confidential #5: Down to Earth

April 3, 2012

You guys, for some reason, I’ve noticed we don’t tend to swear on our blogs in this community of ours, and I’m not sure why that is. Are we really that demure? Did our mommas just raise us right? Maybe the garden blog community is a family show? Regardless, I’ll tell you what: Amy Stewart [...]

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Geomantic

March 29, 2012

Hey! Why isn’t he writing about plants? See here. Beijing, July 2006—I learned how to haggle at a market in China. Our first day in Beijing was Sunday, and all I knew was I had to be at something called the Ghost Market. Not its REAL real name–a transliteration that says “meh” to who knows [...]

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Changes Afoot

March 21, 2012

So. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know it’s pretty much all about plants. Plants are kind of my thing. For a while, though, I’ve had the good fortune to write and talk about plants professionally, and I need to offset that a bit. There are so many stories about other things [...]

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Snapdragon on Steroids, Possibly from Outer Space

March 8, 2012

{Photo: Dave’s Garden user kniphofia} In spite of all the interesting plants I grow, there are those in my household have been known to request and bemoan the lack of, shall we way, simpler things? The humble daylily. The ever-popular hosta. The desire for run-of-the-mill bark mulch, rather than the leaf mold I use from [...]

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