This website is dedicated to my garden and all the glorious animals that live in our suburban yards. On this site, you’ll find individual pages for some of the roses and other plants that I grow (or have grown), with pictures and descriptions gained from years of observation. I live in zone 6a, Long Island, New York. Perhaps the information on these pages will be useful to other gardeners on Long Island or elsewhere in similar climates.
This is the third iteration of my garden pages, called A Long Island Rose Garden. Whereas I did a bit of writing about gardening and life on my previous site, I’m creating the current site mainly as an opportunity to share the numerous photos I’ve taken in my gardens over the years. I find it amusing to see where some of my photos end up on the internet, and I thoroughly encourage visitors to download my photos and use them freely for whatever purposes they need. No permission or crediting is required. (Please note that generally, you should ask people for permission before using their works.)
I hope that these pages will encourage Long Island gardeners to become better informed about sustainability and biodiversity issues. One of my gardening heroes, Monty Don, host of the BBC television program, Gardeners’ World, is famous for not wearing gloves when he works in the garden. These days, people are too scared to even get their hands dirty, so it’s no surprise that we are increasingly feeling disconnected from nature. This, despite the fact that we suburbanites all have our own little patches of green, so there’s no excuse! As stewards of the land, there is so much we can do right now to make this world more habitable for future generations. Ultimately, I hope that more suburbanites will put away their trigger sprayers and highly polluting leaf blowers. A garden should be a sanctuary, not a war zone.
In the video below, watch the eloquent Monty Don talk about the connection between nature and mental health, and listen as he explains why true gardeners like to weed!