Garden Is a Verb: A Compendium of Tips and Trials for Chicagoland Gardening

By Louellen Murray and Eleanor Murray

Fifty years of gardening experience is compiled here into a checklist of routine tasks that will ensure beautiful and healthy plants for the home and garden. This is the what, where, when and how to satisfy the human need to get our hands dirty whenever possible. The information has been collected and culled from the authors formal education, mentors, garden club associates, friends, and family. Some of the processes are her own inventions. The science of growing plants from seed includes the notion of cardboard egg cartons as seedling trays. Tips are provided for everything from deterring deer to composting to growing topiaries. All of the methods have been tried and approved by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543416473

Louellen Murray

Louellen is an Approved Horticulture Judge of the Garden Club of America, a Master Gardener, a member of the Women's Board of the Chicago Horticultural Society (Glencoe, Illinois) and a founding member of the Landscape Advisory Committee at the Morton Arboretum (Lisle, Illinois). She is currently active on the Board of Directors at Elawa Farm Foundation in Lake Forest.

Book preview

Garden Is A Verb

a Compendium

of tips and trials for

Chicagoland Gardening

Louellen Murray

Calligraphy and cover art by Eleanor Murray

Copyright © 2017 by Louellen Murray.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2017905857

ISBN:                   Hardcover                             978-1-5434-1649-7

                            Softcover                               978-1-5434-1648-0

                            eBook                                     978-1-5434-1647-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/04/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

760009

Table of Contents

January

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

February

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

March

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

April

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

May

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

June

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

July

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

August

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

September

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

October

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

November

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

December

The Great Outdoors

The Greenhouse

In Bloom

Appendices

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

Foreword

This book is arranged as a month-by-month checklist of tasks that a gardener may routinely perform. Each month is divided into three sections: what to do in The Great Outdoors, what do in The Greenhouse or windowsill with houseplants and seeds and a listing of flowers that come In Bloom each month. There is also space for Notes.

The illustrations and cartouches are my photographs taken throughout the year at Shadow Pond, our property in Lake Forest, Illinois. They have been rendered into pencil sketches by Photoshop.

Acknowledgements

To my husband, Tim, who, 40 years ago, said, As long as you’re going to stay home with the children, you may as well plant a garden, I am eternally grateful.

To our daughter, Eleanor, who donated the calligraphy and cover art, it was a privilege rubbing shoulders with you.

To Dianne FitzSimons, Director of Elawa Farm Foundation, whose idea it was to offer this book at the Opening Day Market of 2017, its centennial year, my hat is off to you.

Louellen

Shadow Pond, 2017

In Memoriam

Dorothy Deedee Juergens Borland

1943-2016

Img3.jpg100%20Skeleton.jpgJanuary.png72848.png

Image37441.JPG Take advantage of the garden’s exposed skeleton to dream of all the improvements you can make. Think big, of restructuring and reorganizing. Think small, of seeds and dried herbs. Use these pages to record your observations.

Image37441.JPG Curl up with a good book. To help understand why we garden, read Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison (University of Chicago Press, 2008). For practical advice, try Forty Years of Gardening by Anna Gilman Hill (Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1938). For landscape design perspectives that are unique to the prairie states, see Siftings, a memoir published in 1939 by Jens Jensen (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Paperbacks edition, 1990).For the most articulate account of how a to restore a working farm, read Sissinghurst, An Unfinished History, by Adam Nicholson (Open Roads Media, LLC, 2008).

Image37441.JPG Refresh your Botany 101 concepts. Knowing how plants grow is the only way to keep them healthy. Use the proper terms for the botanical parts of flowers and leaves, illustrated in Appendix A for easy reference.

Image37441.JPG Pay a visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden. Tour the library and peruse their botanical print collection before going through the greenhouses.

Image37441.JPG Save the beautiful spring catalogs that arrive in the mail. They are soon to become collector’s items.

Image37441.JPG Do not order anything from unsolicited catalogs without checking them out on Dave’s Garden website (www.davesgarden.com). Click the tab for Products & Sources.

Image37441.JPG The best flower and seed catalogs are listed in Appendix B per recommendations by Erika Vernon, Gardner at Elawa Farms, Lake Forest, Illinois, and The Real Dirt, produced periodically by the Horticulture Committee of the Garden Club of America and others.

Image37441.JPG It’s a mystery to me how there can be any money made in selling flower seeds, wrote Anna Gilman Hill in the 1930s. The answer, she surmised, must be in the tremendous ever-growing demand. More gardeners, more garden clubs, every year. It would be interesting to learn how many packets of blue cornflower seeds are sold in a year. Truly, blue cornflower seeds are fun