Posts Tagged ‘flowers’

Rosemary, Begonia and Pelargonium Window Boxes at Hotel Delmano

There’s a lot to swoon over at Hotel Delmano in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: the cocktails, the yuppie snacks, and the steampunk smashed with speakeasy style of the place. Me? My favorite part was their window boxes. They serve a drink here called the Granny Polite – white port mixed with fresh lemon and tonic.  Pelargonium and [...]

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Creating a Full-Sun Hanging Basket for Our Brooklyn Roof Garden

The hanging basket on our roof garden faces some big challenges. The hanging basket has to be able to withstand strong gusts of wind and direct, drying sunlight for most of the day. Last summer we went through three different hanging baskets. The lantana performed the best, so we knew we’d make lantna the center [...]

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Tulips in the Tree Pit, Brooklyn Style

Tree pit gardening is tough on my Brooklyn block. If the dog pee doesn’t get ya, the flower pickers might. Congratulations to this Brooklyn gardener for a beautiful springtime display.

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Spring Window Boxes in the West Village

>> More window boxes.

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Stoop Sighting: First Flowers on Park Place

Today is the first day of spring! We don’t know the name of this plant (do you?), but we love how this bush brightens this Brooklyn brownstone stoop.

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The Hanging Basket Report: Better Luck Next Year

We went through two hanging baskets this summer. We had this pink, perfect mini-petunia in June. Once the petunia baked on our roof garden, we swapped it out for this yellow lantana. By the end of August, the lantana fell to the dry windy heat too. (A neighbor criticized us for growing lantana, a plant [...]

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Just Ordered Crocuses for Our Roof Garden

Last night I bought Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. This morning, after reading this passage from the end of the first chapter, I ordered 75 crocus bulbs: “Our first autumn in Pepperell, we also planted bulbs, daffodils of course and crocus and tulips and hyacinths. The day in March when [...]

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Best Roof Garden Plant: Portulaca

Our pansies are past their prime and the lantana languished in the heat . . . but our portulaca is still perfect. Portulaca is low maintenance (no dead-heading required!) fast growing drought-tolerant annual. As fall approaches, the portulaca is still pumping out flowers so we’ve moved this container to a high visibility perch on our [...]

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Growing Bulbs in Rooftop Containers

I’m looking for some advice on growing spring bulbs in rooftop containers. Can you help? We want to play some bulbs this fall and let them sleep up on the roof all winter and then bursting with some early color up there. Since our pots are 12-16″, there’s not much soil there to insulate bulbs [...]

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Best Roof Garden Plants: Miscanthus sinensis Cabaret

Miscanthus sinensis Cabaret wins the most valuable player award in our Brooklyn roof garden. As first year roof gardeners, we didn’t want to sink a lot of money on trees. We were also worried that trees might be too heavy for the roof or need too much water.So we’re using this grass to play a [...]

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