One Plant, One Bird. Pickerelweed & American Bittern. I have only seen an American Bittern maybe three times in the last twenty three years, here at Totem Farm. The first time it flew into a larg...
One Plant, One Bird: is a new series I just started. My goal is to be able to identify the birds in my garden by their song. There are also lots of wildflowers I can never remember. By making a...
After 23 years, we have decided to sell Totem Farm and plan on moving to the UK. I made this video as a farewell to my garden. I Hope you enjoy it. Best, Don Statham
In late June and early July, there is the first wave of flowering perennials, mostly a variety of tall geraniums, Campanula lactiflora, Dracocephalum sibiricum (the back bone of the garden) in di...
Three years ago I had the good fortune to be invited by a Dutch friend to visit her childhood home in Holland and tour some Dutch gardens. At the top of my list were the gardens of one the twenti...
Spring is the season of the big clean-up after winter. Weeks are spent cutting back perennials, dividing, transplanting plants, moving plants, shaping shrubs, edging paths, and weeding, Once the ...
Early flowering perennials begin in May and early June and flower intensely until the beginning of July when the late flowering perennials begin and continue into late fall. I find there is often...
https://donstathamblog.com/2017/07/25/adding-color-to-the-mid-summer-border/
The plants that are grabbing my attention at the moment are the large leaf plants. Large shapes of green color in contrast with smaller more delicate perennials create a pause and slow you down a...
https://donstathamblog.com/2017/06/14/late-spring-the-benefits-of-large-foliage-plants/
Around the 1870’s bluestone quarries were booming in the Catskills providing large cut slabs of slate for the sidewalks in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Toronto and many towns and cities in ...
https://donstathamblog.com/2017/05/30/fieldstone-path-planted-with-woolly-thyme/
When I first started laying out the garden I created an allee of a six Taxus cuspidata. I bought the plants already quite large, six foot tall by five feet wide, perfect pyramidal shapes that add...