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By MICKEY RATHBUN

Many gardens go drab this time of year after summer flowers have faded away. But in fields and along roadsides, swaths of native asters add explosions of color to the transitioning landscape, with their golden centered, star-shaped flowers ranging...

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

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

Most of us humans assume that other creatures experience the world through their senses of sound, taste, smell and touch, the same way we do. But we couldn’t be more wrong, as science writer Ed Yong explains in his fascinating new book, “An Immense...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

As the calendar page flips to the short but cruel month of February, I suspect that many gardeners, like me, are getting tired of the somber palette of gray and brown.Just in time to rescue us from seasonal ennui, a wonderful documentary, “Painting...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

There’s not a lot going on in my garden, now blanketed under a foot of snow, to inspire this month’s column. So I took a break from dreaming over the spring promise of seed catalogs and went in search of a soul-satisfying poem about the garden in...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

It’s February. A few days 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

Crabapple trees are one of my favorite ornamental spring trees. A mainstay of the New England landscape, they offer three seasons of interest, plus a handsome branching habit that looks good all winter long, especially when decked with freshly fallen...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

I have a big patch of daylilies behind my house. They are a disorganized jumble of plants that were given to me along with others that I’ve bought at plant sales, nurseries and farmers markets. I have never paid much attention to this part of the...

Mistletoe is one of those Christmas traditions that many of us know little about, beyond the fact that people are supposed to kiss under it when it’s hung in a doorway during the holiday season. I got curious about it a few years ago when a friend...

We’re entering that dark cold part of the year, when color drains from the landscape and we yearn for some bright growing things. A terrific way to enliven the winter months is to pot up some amaryllis bulbs. At first sight, the large, knobby bulbs...