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By MICKEY RATHBUN

The 2025 UMass Garden Calendar comes out every fall, just as we are putting our gardens to bed for the winter. As always, the calendar is a must-have for gardeners. It gives daily tips on indoor and outdoor gardening and other related subjects,...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Late summer isn’t a pretty time in the garden, at least not in my garden. The recent mini-drought has bleached out what passes for lawn, several large hydrangeas are drooping as they beg me for water, the daylily borders are shriveled and brown....

By MICKEY RATHBUN

It’s August and in my household that means one thing: local tomatoes. For much of the year, our grocery stores offer tomatoes tough enough to endure machine picking followed by days or weeks in cold storage. Even the more expensive, so-called...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Anyone with a passing knowledge of art history is familiar with the acanthus plant, whether they know it or not. The acanthus leaf, broad and serrated, is the decorative motif on the capital of the classical Corinthian column, more ornate than the...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

After long weeks of yearning for gardening weather, we’re suddenly inundated by spring. Endless outdoor chores beg for our attention — composting, mulching, edging, scrubbing birdbaths and, at least in my garden beds, pulling out multitudes of maple...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

The word “herbarium” sounds a bit quaint, even antiquated. We may think of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, which she created during her year at Mount Holyoke in 1847-48. Although she had begun studying plants at age 9 and was helping her mother in the...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

A recent headline in the New York Times caught my eye: “Mars Needs Insects.” As the article explained, if we are to create a human-friendly habitat on Mars, we will need to grow food there.Unlike the nutrient-laden soil that covers the earth, the...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening....

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Earlier this week my friend Lisa, a demon flower-designer, mentioned to me that she had agreed to provide the floral decorations for her cousin’s birthday party in New York. She lamented that there weren’t many flowers for sale at this time of year...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

One of the many casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic was the series of annual spring gardening symposiums hosted by the Western Massachusetts Master Gardeners Association (WMMGA). These popular events helped gardeners of all abilities expand their...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

It’s February. A few weeks ago, the temperature outside was an untoasty -10 degrees, weather that challenges the reaches of our imaginations to conjure images of newly planted vegetable seeds sprouting in our gardens. But it’s never too soon to start...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

A few years ago I was having coffee with my two sisters-in-law at a family gathering in North Carolina. Both of them had recently built new houses and were quizzing me about how to create gardens in the bare dirt surrounding their homes. The question...