January 23, 2025

“For gardeners, this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogs, making lists ..., and dreaming their dreams.”

– Katharine White (1892-1977), American writer and editor, “A Romp in the Catalogues,” The New Yorker, 1958 (and collected in Onward and Upward in the Garden, 1979)

Happy New Year!

We are back at work after enjoying the holidays with family and friends – we hope yours were lovely as well! It’s now the time of year when our (home) mailboxes are filled with seed catalogs offering perfect opportunities to dream up new garden plans and possibilities in the coming year. We’re continuing to work towards moving OHG to our own farmland and buildings this coming year, with building partway completed – we’ll keep you posted on our progress! Here’s wishing us all a year happily spent in our gardens, with plenty of sun, just enough rain, very few weeds, and lots and lots of flowers!

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Warm Your Winter by Ordering NOW for Spring Delivery

It may still be winter but don’t forget to order your BULBS for spring planting! We no longer mail out a catalog, so no need to wait: you’ll find our current 2025 Spring offerings posted online now. Weather permitting, our shipping season starts April 1 for all of our

hardy heirloom iris

care-free, sturdy daylilies,

bountiful dahlias for endless bouquets,

graceful glads (including small-flowered varieties that even glad-haters love),

fragrant tuberoses, lovely lilies,

elegant, unique ‘Ehemanii’ canna,

starry crocosmia and pixie rain lilies.

Take a look, put in an order for any must-haves before they sell out, and remember to check back (or sign up on our wish list) for varieties not yet on sale for this spring – it’s easy to have us add more bulbs to your order, either by putting in a new order and asking us to combine it with your existing one in the “comments” section or by dropping us an email with the varieties and quantities you’d like to add.

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Take a Break from Snow with a Virtual Visit to the Garden of a Harlem Renaissance Poet

Tired of winter already? Spend some time in the lush restored historic garden of Anne Spencer, an African-American poet, civil-rights advocate, and librarian who lived in Lynchburg, Virginia. Starting in 1905, Anne and her husband Edward transformed their narrow backyard into a highly personal garden with an aqua-blue pergola, a small pool filled by a cast-iron African head spouting water (a gift from W.E.B. DuBois), and beds overflowing with roses, iris, larkspur, poppies, and other flowers. Edward was an early up-cycler, reusing materials in both the house and garden structures he built. The Garden Conservancy has made an excellent short documentary about the history of the garden as both a refuge and inspiration for Anne Spencer’s writing and, with the house, a place to gather with friends and colleagues that included

After Anne’s death in 1975, the garden that she’d called “half my world” was all but lost – but, remarkably, it wasn’t! In Virginia Public Media’s short film with host Peggy Singlemann visits the garden and talks with Jane B. White, who convinced the local garden club to do the restoration, and with Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, learning about the importance of Anne’s garden in her life and work. If you’d rather explore through reading, here’s a fascinating Smithsonian article (with photos) which may in turn inspire you to read Jane White’s lavish book family photos taken in the garden, notes Anne scribbled on seed catalogs, poems she wrote in her garden cottage, receipts, newspaper clippings, snapshots of the restoration, and evocative photos of the restored garden today.

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Reminder: It’s Time to Check Your Stored Dahlias

If (like us) you carefully tucked your dahlias into storage last fall and then got busy with Thanksgiving and family holidays, now’s the time to take a look and see how they’re doing. We recommend that you keep them in a cool, dry, dark place, ideally between 40-45 F. Look for condensation, letting some moisture escape if you see it, or shriveling of tubers, in which case sprinkle or mist them with a little water. Make a note of any varieties looking iffy so you can check them again in a few weeks in case you want to reorder them before they sell out. (And, for those of you new to dahlias, you don’t need to store your dahlias – you can treat them as annuals or frost-tender perennials that you just replace in the spring.)

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