Have you ever experienced one of those times when something that’s really small, not a big deal at all in the overall scheme of life, just sets you off? That happened to me, around the middle of July, when I faced the realization head-on that I wasn’t going to get any tomatoes from my garden. We’d marched through one disappointment after the other like troopers: school closures, canceled vacation, a soccer season cut short (and by short I mean...

There are times when winter can really be depressing. Days on end of cloudy, gray skies. Darkness when you wake up in the morning and when you eat supper at night. Gardens empty of blooms, littered with dried up leaves blown about in wind storms. And then you have a day like this: It’s one of the things I love about living in the South. Sunshine and blue skies. While they don’t come every single day, at least we get them year round. I love how...

My grandmother was known to have a saying for about any situation. One of the many I heard as a child was “The cobbler’s kids never have shoes.” Once I figured out what a cobbler was, that saying started to make sense to me. Maybe it was a painter working on Grandma’s dining room and talking about how his wife had wanted her own kitchen painted, or the carpenter fixing her steps and talking about the bookshelf he hoped to build for his kids....

This past weekend, I tackled a garden project that I’ve been putting off for years. I dug up all the irises in front of our house, and moved them to an entirely new area, which I’m hoping will now become “The Iris Bed.” When we first moved into this house, I admit I went a little crazy with my flowers. I have always loved English cottage gardens, and I wanted a garden surrounding my house that was all flowers, full of blooms at all times of the...

In my many years editing for Carolina Gardener and reading various gardening publications, I became very familiar with the extension agents’ favorite saying: “Right Plant, Right Place.” Basically this means you want to understand the environmental needs of a plant before you put it in the ground. You don’t take a sun-loving zinnia and plant it in the woods, just like you wouldn’t put the shade-loving heuchera out in an open garden with full...

It might just be because we are more aware of things with the advent of Facebook and social media, or it might be my age, but it seems like many of my friends have been dealing with the loss of a grandparent. Often, it is the last living grandparent, and one they are very close to. I experienced this myself a couple of years ago, when my Grandma Milholland suffered a stroke and passed away shortly before Christmas that year. It is hard to lose...