January/February

Read 'Em and Weep

January (and February and December...oh, and add November to that list...and you might as well throw in March, just to complete the set) is the cruelest month. My readers don't get to garden and I don't get to create answers to gardening questions from whole cloth and lead people into horticultural cul-de-sacs, which gives me endless pleasure during the growing season. . . .

March/April

Step Away from the Garden

Gardeners are patient people, generally. Think about it. In a world in which the cable news cycle changes every 13 minutes or so, a gardener will wait for six months or longer for a seed to germinate. Gardeners put in perennials and shrubs knowing that they will reach their full potential about the same time as their kids do. . . .

May/June

The Birds Is Coming!

“And good English has went.”

That's how it was. At least that's how I remember it. I am, unfortunately, old enough to have a memory of when Alfred Hitchcock made his film “The Birds.” (Hint: don't watch it before visiting the aviary.) The tag line for the advertising campaign was “The birds is coming!” However, I was pretty young (really) and I remember the Mad Magazine parody as well or better than the actual movie. . . .

July/August

Attack of the Killer Asparagus

I had one of those horticultural dreams the other night. You know what I'm talking about. The ones where you're being attacked by giant loppers and you're running through a field that's been sprayed with a sticking agent so that it's like running on fly paper and it's slowing you down and the loppers are gaining on you and

September/October 2007

Compost Tales

I believe it was the Shakespearean actor and gardener Ralph Kean (second cousin of the even more Shakespearean Edmund Kean) who remarked, "Ya know, dying is easy. Composting is weird." As far as I have been able to determine, Ralph didn't work much on stage. Or in the garden, for that matter.

November/December 2007

Mike's 2nd Annual Holiday Hort Sing-Along

It's been that kind of year. I've been breaking all sorts of personal rules.
I don't know what came over me when I put actual information into this column (see July/August). I think I was suffering from a summer fever.

And here I go again. I never repeat column ideas, but I'm reprising my holiday sing-along. Maybe it was the letter from the woman who said she read my songs and couldn't stop crying. Or perhaps it was the letter from my editor who said, "If you don't have a column to us by tomorrow, we're putting a monkey at a keyboard and seeing what he produces."