This Week's Podcast: A Replay: Let the Plants Make the Garden with Kristin Green
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Everyone loves the vision of exuberant gardens filled with flowers. Kristin Green is a full-time gardener who has demonstrated the lush look at Blithewold Mansion, Gardens and Arboretum, a 33-acre property open to the public in Bristol, RI.
I think the first time I visited Blithewold was when I was in college in RI decades ago. Blithewold hadn’t found its way, back then, but in the subsequent years, and with the help of Kristin, it has become a popular and important public garden in the Ocean State. But even when I first visited, the legacy of this former estate was evident some important trees planted by its founding family in a beautiful setting over 100 years ago including an actual giant redwood (below).
Now, Kristin has published a book on her personal style titled Plantiful, in which she tells how to encourage rugged plants that deliver and reproduce to fill in and put on a bountiful show. She presents 150 self-sowers (like butterfly weed and friends, below), clumping varieties and tender plants.
The book is beautifully written, and admits a few things you don’t always see spelled out in ornamental-garden books. You do not have to wait decades to have a garden. You do not have to have tons of money to make a garden. And how about the common call to “get the garden done in no time?”
Kristin writes, “…it’s a work in progress that gets better all the time. I have been chasing my dream garden long enough to know that it’s the chase that keeps me gardening. After all, no garden is ever done.”
Read more from Kristin at her blog trenchmanicure.
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