Louisville was spared deadly weather but still broke records this spring with warm temperatures. Allen Bush shares the trophies. It’s been a record-breaking late winter and early spring in Kentucky. A tornado, the deadliest to hit the Ohio Valley since 1974, clobbered Henryville, Indiana. We spent a couple of hours in the basement on March […]
Allen Bush, just back from a major conference of plantsmen, remembers two impossibilities and several mentors that sealed his gardening fate. I’d barely shoved-off from the hotel curbside when the cab driver asked abruptly, “What’s your name?” I hadn’t swept the sleep from my eyes but I knew where this was going. It’s not commonplace […]
Kentuckian Allen Bush pushes the limit with new plants from Florida, seduced by the USDA’s new maps. The long awaited interactive garden tool was released a few weeks before our Florida vacation. I didn’t study the new map, though I could see Louisville, Kentucky, was colored some shade of green. There were adjacent greens but […]
Taking out one endangered tree seems to cause more alarm than the threat to a whole species. Allen Bush takes out an ash and takes on the neighborhood. Arborists cut down our big white ash tree a few weeks before Christmas. It had stood in the front yard since 1974. My neighbors weren’t happy with […]
Two years after its seed was collected in a remote Afghan village, a tiny cedar settles into its new Kentucky home. The Himalayan cedar barely got a nod last month at the silent auction in Louisville, Kentucky. Jack Alexander from the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University had donated a tiny Cedrus deodara but the seedling […]
Allen Bush explores alpine possibilities in the Ohio River Valley. What a view! It happened so fast. One day I’m “shovel ready” on cheap landscape jobs in Louisville, Kentucky, and the next, I’m falling in love with tight buns in London. (Trust me: You won’t find buns like these in the bakery!) Ground hugging Dionysias […]
Plantsman Allen Bush was on a collecting trip in Sichuan, China, on 9/11. Ten years later, he remembers the helplessness of distance and the security gained from two tiny companions, their feet on the ground. I was with a group of plant explorers in Kanding, China on the evening of September 11, 2001. We’d just […]
Talk about a dream hike in the Rockies…two expert mountain plantsmen meet at last, and lead the way to Pike’s Peak. Eighty-two % of Colorado’s population lives on the Front Range megalopolis—north and south of Denver—but, if you’ve got a shred of interest in alpine flowers, curiosity will lead you west across the Continental Divide […]
It’s hotter than a boiled peanut! Time for the hard-core gardeners of the Mid-South—like Allen Bush—to show what they’re made of. After two hours of weeding and planting in the sweltering morning heat, it’s usually time to throw in the towel. Well, not quite. I keep a towel handy to wipe the sweat off my […]
Plant experts from the U.S. and the U.K. unite to tour “the crossroads of sporangia,” otherwise known as Kentucky. Thank you, Allen! Sarah Palin, the revisionist expert on Paul Revere’s warning, never saw the British coming, yet the occasional elected official and non-stop self-promoter needn’t worry about foreign invaders, at least not these: Royal subjects […]