In Philadelphia, a Garden Grows Wild – NYTimes.com

• Ms. Ruddick decided to embrace the philosophy embodied in a line she remembered from an old New Yorker: “Don’t just do something. Stand there!”

• She worked for years in India, she said, where people stop for the rituals that mark the passages of life.

  “How many times has somebody gotten married, and you just can’t go because of too much work or something?” she asked. “They don’t miss these things. The whole place stops. I feel like we just don’t stop enough.”

  What a radical thought: just standing there, in the gardens, and in our lives, too.

Facebook Brine Garden page

• Monday: Anne Raver talk on her FAVES at the Horticultural Society “closer to home, Duncan and Julia Brine, who have created six acres of wild, painterly gardens in Pawling, NY.? “

   

  The Horticultural Society of New York

  www.hsny.org

  April 11, 2011

In the Garden – Pushing for Sustainable Landscapes – NYTimes.com

• By ANNE RAVER
• The report  includes a point system for rating a landscape, much like the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which rates the sustainability of buildings. The LEED system, created by the United States Green Building Council, a private group of architects, engineers, builders, manufacturers and others, has been around since 1993. But its ratings — even platinum, the highest one, so sought-after by green builders — focus much more on buildings than on the land around them.
• The initiative, on the other hand, goes into detail, specifying the kinds of plants, for example, that can be used to cleanse a disturbed wetland; how trees can be used to shade a building, protect it from wind, prevent erosion and clean the air; and what kind of plantings enhance mental health, draw people outside the building and even engage them in tending the landscape.
• The Sustainable Sites Initiative can be downloaded at sustainablesites.org.

In the Garden – A Garden Where Foliage Eclipses Flowers – NYTimes.com

• ANYTHING GOES Nancy Ondra’s garden in Pennsburg, Penn.

  By ANNE RAVER

  Published: July 31, 2008

• There’s an experimental, anything-goes feeling about Hayefield — from the soft cedars allowed to flourish in the field, to the alpacas, Duncan and Daniel, grazing in the pasture, and the 1,200-square-foot log house made of Eastern white pine.
• “Who needs flowers?” That question, which opens “Foliage: Astonishing Color and Texture, Beyond Flowers,” the book Ms. Ondra published last year, with photographs by Rob Cardillo, came back to me as I admired the combination.
• Ms. Ondra’s boisterous one-acre garden surrounds the little house, which she designed herself, with its wide, wraparound porch — a fine, shady place for viewing the plants and the fields beyond. She settled here in 2001, after years of editing and writing garden books for Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pa., and a stint running Pendragon Perennials, the rare-plants nursery she had created on a fifth of an acre outside of her house there and run for five years.

In the Garden – An Executive’s 2nd Act – Tending an Upstate Oasis – NYTimes.com

• By ANNE RAVER

  Published: June 19, 2008

  COPAKE FALLS, N.Y.

• MY friend Suzanne and I headed out of the city last week for a leisurely wallow in an upstate garden: Margaret Roach’s personal paradise in the hills of Columbia County.
• This woman was living my dream — and the dream of so many other 50-somethings like us, who long to rekindle the creative fire that is snuffed out in the corporate world. And her garden blog was the best I’d ever seen. Her observations were so palpable I wanted to see the real thing.

Rhapsody in Blue – New York Times – Annotated

• By ANNE RAVER

  Published: March 27, 2008

• NATURAL Landscapes, a wholesale nursery, supplies the Delaware Nature Society’s native plant sale,

• The New England Wild Flower Society’s Nasami Farm, in Whately, Mass.

• Online sources include Wayside Gardens

• Edible Landscaping

• Forestfarm