Winter 2015-2016

There are 36 advertisers in this issue. I have personally met 23 of them. The rest are phone friends, most of whom I’ve known for years. I can tell you that they are good people, running family businesses they started because they love gardening, had a product they were excited about sharing (be it manure tea or a rose to help gardeners across the world), and wanted to make a living doing it.  READ MORE

Laurel Radomski: How appropriate that WI’s Laurel started off the first issue of our Anniversary Year, as well as this last one—with her wonderful “Encora Imparo.” Bonnie Szantyr: From Morris, CT: “Getting published in GREENPRINTS would rank up there with having my great American novel published!"  READ MORE

I’ll bet you’re going to go home now and have a glass of wine." That’s what I said to my friend Deb after we toured my slightly chaotic prairie gardens. “Oh, no,” she replied, “I’m going to need the whole bottle!” We giggled. Deb is my compulsive, type-A friend.  READ MORE

I had definitely decided to give up fruit and vegetable gardening. Just flowers from now on. Oh, I’ll keep the pumpkin and gourd patch that spreads over the side yard—if the seedlings survive the beetles. And I do love straight-from-the-stalk sweet corn.  READ MORE

I didn’t know when I received the seeds what they’d bring. My daughter and I were walking our dogs in Huntington Beach, California, when we came across school kids offering envelopes of free seeds: “Asclepias curassavica—Tropical Milkweed.  READ MORE

One Summer, when I worked for a small-town newspaper here in West Virginia, Don and Willalea Kelley invited me to their home to cover what Don calls his “stinking plant.” Don, a board member at the local senior center, is especially proud of his blueberry bushes and also, apparently, of his exotic lilies.  READ MORE

Many pick-your-own farms dot the New Jersey countryside where we live. One of our favorites is Valley View Farm, where we harvest the sweetest, juiciest red raspberries around. Carole and I arrive early on an August morning, before the throngs show up.   READ MORE

In the 1920s, many newspapers and magazines featured glowing accounts of a man who transformed a desolate, barren, and depressing site into one of the country’s most fabulous gardens.  READ MORE

Daphne, Daphne, Daphne…for many years the name conjured images not of a beautiful flower but of Jack Lemmon in the movie Some Like It Hot. What can I say? I’m a movie buff.   READ MORE

It takes a special approach to make gardening fun for children. My dear late Grandpa Adrian clearly did not understand this concept—and, due to this, ended up locked in his backyard tool shed. I still say that it wasn’t really my fault.  READ MORE

Stone walls do not a prison make. Nor iron bars a cage Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage. Thus whispered Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey to his beloved Harriet when she was wrongfully imprisoned.  READ MORE

I knew I would get into trouble when I agreed to lead a tour through the south of France this past summer, and I thought I had already achieved my goal when my wife left her hairbrush behind.   READ MORE

The very first time I had a garden on a public tour it rained. A steady, all-day rain, something to be much appreciated after a long, hot summer. That said, I had just spent about six weeks in exhausting heat, beginning August 1, whipping the place into shape for that tour, so I was not one bit appreciative of that admitted blessing.  READ MORE

My dad ran a family farm on 70 acres in rural Ohio. He milked cows and grew and sold corn, soybeans, and alfalfa hay. It was a good life, but definitely a frugal one.  READ MORE

In Andy Weir’s The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney, victim of a freak accident, has been left for dead on Mars. Now 140 million miles from home, stranded and incommunicado, but very much alive, he has to figure out how to survive on his own for four years.  READ MORE

As part of our 25th anniversary year, I’ve run stories from each of our four offspring about growing up with a magazine business in the house. For the very last piece of our anniversary year, I asked the two people who most directly deal with our subscribers to write about YOU, the magazine’s readers—for you, too, are a big part of the GREENPRINTS family.  READ MORE