Hello, Rose of Sharon (and more)

My dear wife Karen’s careful clipping up front at A Bitty Better in the Liverpool neighborhood of Galeville has paid off again this month of August. She asked if I’d looked closely at the tallest of our front yard garden plants last weekend. The Rose of Sharon had bloomed, big and bright. I had to…

When it grows, it grows fast

Cold, cold, cold, right to summer. That’s the way it seems to have turned here in the Liverpool neighborhood of Galeville. And when our lawn around A Bitty Better needed its first cut of the season … … it really needed it. Front and back. This made the task a bit more labor intensive than…

A trio to fill in the gaps

Here are the three plants my dear wife Karen decided we’d take home from the Regional Market to help complete the first-growing-season stocking of our gardens of A Bitty Better in the Liverpool neighborhood of Galeville. One is a perennial, the other two annuals. I’m a stay-with-us guy. Karen says we can always get more…

Now we see a purple tiger stripe

Of course my dear wife Karen and I both hold our breath after putting the new plants into the ground at A Bitty Better in the Liverpool neighborhood of Galeville. I do not think we need worry much about the tiger lily chosen by George Three for her Mother’s Day present. Soon after we put…

So many new plants to color A Bitty Better

My dear wife Karen’s weekly food run to the local supermarket got sidetracked. I’d had my suspicion as the clock ticked on, but the text I received from Ballantyne Gardens over on Hopkins Road cemented the deal. I admired the plant in the photo she sent over. Little did I know how much more there’d…

Behold the multi-colored butterfly bush

The last of our big three butterfly bushes pushed out its blooms. Behold, to the right, the multi-colored beauty. We loved the completed trifecta in the triangle garden in the backyard of the cherished Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. Yeah, I love the look back there, for sure. No question about…

Watch that branch, will you?

I was standing outside the library with colleague and friend Martina, waiting for walkers to show up. She spotted a piece of the new garden, at the middle of the corner of Tulip and Second streets. The blue spruce, with its center branch extending high into the air. Martina thought that tree carried a message.…

The big yard’s looking unique

I had to take an early summer checkup on the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood yard that my dear wife Karen and I admire so much for the roses. Yes, the double-wide plot around the block from the Little Bitty looked good during a recent walk with Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle. It’s not just…

Now we need butterfly bushes and butterflies

The wonder of the triangle butterfly garden of our cherished Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood takes my breath away in stages. In the 7 a.m. pre-workday light, the rush of white from the daisies coming in from the right and purple of the climbing Polish plant taking over on the let…