The blog…

This is not really a garden blog. I migrated my garden website to WordPress partly because I would like to try it out as a content management tool, and partly to allow me to inform viewers of my website on any updates I make from time to time via the RSS feed.

The gardeners….

I would like to think of our gardening hobby as a journey in the fascinating world of ornamental plant culture, or a never ending experiment in collaboration with mother nature.  Although we have gardened for more than 20 years, we continuously find ourselves struggling to know and understand plants, to accommodate mother nature, and to learn from other gardeners.

Although we tend to ‘collect’ plants, we are more interested in experimenting on how a specific plant is used within a garden composition context (rather than simply acquiring plants because they are rare or new).

The garden….

This is a typical Zone 5 garden; fortunate enough to grow oriental maples, some ornamental conifers, and even some flowering trees, but not nearly as fortunate as a Zone 6-8 garden, on the range of ornamental plants that can be reliably grown. In fact, because of the borderline nature of Zone 5 for a wide spectrum of highly ornamental plants, and the incredible temptation to grow them, I suspect gardening in Zone 5 is probably more challenging (or frustrating) than other Zones.

I do not consider our garden  a ‘landscaped garden’.  It would be more appropriately characterized as a ‘sandbox garden’ where the gardener plays in it like kids playing in their sandboxes. It is a slightly more than two acres ‘sandbox’, but only about half an acre is played with so far. The land consists of hopeless clay, and water resource is very limited; the type of land mother nature would label ‘do not garden’.

The fact is, newly collected plants require time to familiarize with their growth and display characteristics. As such, we are destined to continuous adjustment, correction and re-composition of our garden each year.