Gardening at Holly Grove

Gardening Holly Grove 2017 18 December 2016 The ginko leaves have all fallen. We have had some temperatures down to 28 or so. As the priest said this morning “ We were in Key West last night and this morning we are in Alaska.” It was 79 yesterday and the high today was about 40. I have picked a salad. The lettuce does well. The banana leaves are all frost bitten as are the cannas. It is winter. More camellias begin to bloom. 22 December It has been cold and I have been inside by the fire except when Lanny and Susan came up on Tuesday and I went out and got some camellias for the table and some nandina berries for the hall table. It is warmer today but rainy and cloudy. I got down to the potager and dug the sweet potatoes, some small ones. The deer/rabbits had eaten the tops so what do I expect. The peanuts had lost their tops too but did produce some. The ground is really too wet but I needed to do it. I also weeded the area ne...

November 2012 Thanksgiving is a good time to start talking about the garden at Holly Grove.   On Thanksgiving the star of the show is the ginkgo.   It reliably ‘blooms’ (as I call it, although this ginkgo does not bloom and the November show is its great fall yellow color) and is at its peak on Thanksgiving.   Within a week the tree is bare.   The ginkgo is one of the oldest ginkgo’s in the United States.   The giant tree records in the US (National Register of Big Trees) are for native and naturalized trees, neither of which is true of the ginkgo.   Ginkgo, Maidenhair Tree (Ginkgo biloba) is a native of China and therefore was planted here at Holly Grove.   I think this was in the mid-nineteenth century.   Perhaps Sally Stewart Fort who established the extensive gardens at Catalpa, her husband’s plantation outside St. Francisville, Louisiana, sent this tree to her parents at Holly Grove. We know her neighbors, the Turnbulls of Rosedown Pla...