Sick of winter? Then think of summer-flowering bulbs and get happy.

One of my favorite winter thoughts: Lilies blooming on my tiny terrace.


I often procrastinate when ordering bulbs and find myself buried in snow by the time I think about next season's garden. This is why I love summer bulbs: not only do they extend the show by many months, but I can buy and plant them in the spring. I can then forget about them until, just a few months later, I get to watch them bloom. The best part? They are very easy to grow.

Lilies are my first choice for summer flowers. They are beautiful, smell good, and if well chosen, can bloom from June through September, at least in my 6b zone. I buy mainly from two sources, The Lily Garden and Brent and Becky's Bulbs.The first is for more specialized lilies. The latter is for steady favorites and has good prices. The packages usually arrive in early April or timed for your USDA zone.

I am a sucker for the martagons (or Turk's cap style lily), with nodding flowers and delicately recurved petals. It is one of the most feminine and beautiful flower shapes I know. My favorite over the last couple of years has been Lilium "Seafarer", a rich apricot with a deeper ruby ribbing on the back of the tilted petals. Blooming in June, it is lightly scented, with the perfume becoming stronger in the evenings. It looks stunning against any green backdrop.

In this weekly series "Growing Herbs", our expert gardener Marie Viljoen tells us about the many uses for a particular herb and how to grow it at home.

For the first in a weekly series of posts about easy-to-grow and delicious herbs, I decided to kick off with parsley. It is so ubiquitous that we hardly seem to register its presence on menus and in supermarkets.

Even though I have a small space for growing herbs, I am never without parsley. A handful of finely chopped leaves added to lemon zest perks up stews and braised dishes. Some leaves whizzed into gazpacho moments before it is served give a necessary little kick. The tough stalks put in the cavity of a chicken as it roasts will perfume the entire bird. A few leaves tossed into a green salad can turn it into a flavorful vitamin C feast.

Most herbs need a lot of sun, but parsley can get by on as little as four hours a day. Flatleaf or curly parsley are equally delicious. I buy seedlings in spring and plant them in compost or good potting soil with at least 3 inches between plants.

Alternatively, start them from seed as soon as the threat of frost is past. Excellent drainage is essential, with a thorough soaking necessary only when the top 1/2" of soil has dried. When harvesting, snip the stalk near the base of the plant. Watering with a tea of compost or worm juice from your worm farm once a week is good for fertilizing, but parsley will perform well without this added treat.

Baby, it's cold outside! Just because we're in the thick of winter doesn't mean your garden must be bereft of blooms. As much as I enjoy the silence and emptiness of a cold garden, I love watching a flower brave the elements -- taking on what we could consider botanical Siberia.

Everyone makes a fuss over spring blooms, but a winter garden in bloom? To me, that's far more special. Here are five of my winter favorites, blooming sequentially from late fall to pre-spring in my Zone 6. These are shrubs that defy the odds by insisting on flowering when it is cold.



Camellia "Winter's Snowman"
I came across this Camellia while shopping for a shrub that would bloom as late in the year as possible. It's luscious white flowers are perversely delicate-looking, given its bloom time of late November. They stand out beautifully against glossy, evergreen leaves. This is a cultivar of Camellia sasanqua - also known as Christmas camellias - signifying late fall and early winter bloom. (Camellia japonica cultivars bloom in early spring.) It needs a sheltered spot out of the wind, or its leaves and flowers will suffer frost bite below 15'F. It is hardy to Zone 6, prefers slightly acidic soil, does not like full sun (dappled shade is best) and likes well drained, though moist soil.















Hamamelis virginiana (American witch hazel) and Hamalis vernalis (Ozark witch hazel)
What's not to love? Not only are these two witch hazel native to North America, but they bloom in early winter (late October through December) and pre-spring (February through March), respectively. H. vernalis is scented. I love coming upon their frilly yellow streamers just when I think that everything is dead or asleep in the landscape. They even bloom in the snow -- an even more dramatic sight. Hardy to Zone 5 and possibly to Zone 4, tolerant of most soils, as long as they drain well, they like semi shade or full sun, and belong to the understoreys of native woods, meaning that dappled shade is perfect.


Jasminum nudiflorum (winter jasmine)
Depending on the weather, this sprawling, bright yellow jasmine could bloom in early winter or very early spring. Here in New York City, I have seen it in flower in December as well as late February. It is sometimes mistaken for Forysthia but blooms much earlier and has a habit of training up railings and arbors, or for spreading horizontally across terraced rock gardens. Hardy to Zone 6, wanting full sun, the dark green branches are almost leafless making their spectacular yellow flowers all the more dramatic when they erupt in the cold.



Edgeworthia papyrifera
When I am told that a plant is scented, my ears perk up. When I learn that it will scent the garden in late February, I get excited. With stout, almost succulent-like stems and broad green leaves, this deciduous shrub from China forms pendulous, downy silver buds in fall, which remain attractively on the bare branches through the cold weather. In late winter, they open into perfumed, pale yellow flowers before the plant leafs out. It is hardy to Zone 7, and possibly Zone 6, with protection (my rooftop-planted Edgeworthia is an experiment this year), prefers full sun and a neutral soil pH. This is a plant collector's delight: weird and wonderful.

I've got some children in my life for whom buying Christmas gifts is often a challenge. Most of them have everything they need or want. What could I give them that would be meaningful, fun and easy on my wallet? What could amuse them for more than an hour's time and not squeak, break or drive their parents mad?

Browsing in GRDN the other day, a pretty little garden store in Brooklyn, New York, I found a stack of beautifully packaged Hudson Valley Seed Library seeds. On a whim I bought many packets of spotted trout lettuce as well as borage, some dragon beans, ruby beets, arugula, New Yorker tomatoes and broccoli. Each package fits perfectly inside an envelope along with a Christmas card. They also make perfect stocking stuffers.

I adore figs. They have always been one of my favorite fruits. They're evocative and sexy. Whenever I see them on a menu as part of a dessert, I beg for a small plateful, virginal and un-messed with. When I stayed one February at Dennehof in Prince Albert, a small, hot town at the foot of the Swartberg known as South Africa's fig capital, breakfast began with an oversized white plate, in the center of which was poised a peeled fig. It was just off the tree, comforted by slices of prickly pear and cubes of mango. It was simple and gorgeous.


I dislike intensely cooked figs and dried figs. I despise Fig Newtons. I hate fig jam. But a fresh fig? Oh, it's where life can begin and end, for me. So when I saw a little, beautifully pruned tree in a pot with small green fruit already on its branches at a farmers' market in the spring of 2007, I had to have it. I bought it and carried it home on the subway to my tiny terrace in Brooklyn.

The plant in my arms broke down the New York barriers that people normally throw up, where they are apparently indifferent to goings on and where the more bizarre the behavior, the more studiously it is ignored. But with plants and bunches of flowers and apple pie, I've noticed, people become engaged and make contact. Most didn't even know what it was and asked me. Some people just smiled inclusively, as if we shared a secret. It was nice.

On a June evening two years ago I noticed that four of the figs were nearly ripe. I felt like throwing a party. Every May I have a party for my roses. For a fig party would we each have one slice, with a piece of Serrano ham? That was the only year the fig made ripe fruit so early, perhaps because it had been reared in a greenhouse. I had a lot to learn.

I am a latecomer to the Woods. I have seen the Western Cape in springtime and the dunes of the Namib in summer. And now that I have seen the forests of the Catskills in fall, the loveliest of American seasons, I know that this landscape ranks with the greats.

As a garden designer working and gardening in New York City, I keep expanding my palette of rooftop and garden-suitable plants. I try to incorporate native plants into my schemes, without a too-fundamental definition of what native means. There are layers upon layers of 'local': a niche, a county, a state, a region, a coast, a country, a continent. I start small and see where the ripples go.

Forays into any kind of plant territory educate and inspire me. I came across several plants on a recent roadtrip to the mountains around Woodstock, NY, which surprised me. Amidst the larger, leafy splendor I focused: a yellow witch hazel blooming in fall. Barberry growing en masse under the trees. A blue-berried shrub beside a stream. Flame-leafed euonymous in the town and then in the forest. Knapweed by a roadside. Dolls' eyes near a water fall. Bouquets of rosehips. Asters, everywhere.

Plants always pose these questions: what am I doing here, and how can you – or should you - use me?