Shop for Garden

With a  motto of  "Made To Be Used and Built to Last",  this North Norfolk English company makes smocks, raincapes and sleeveless vests (jerkins), canvas bags, fire blowers and log carriers.  Owner Tina Guillory works from her 17th century house making such products as the traditional Norfolk Slop, a windproof sailcloth smock; popular with painters, gardeners and woodworkers. The clothing items are for both men and women such as  a ladies and man's Norfolk jacket style and various hat choices. Children's smocks come in sizes 2-4.

Rain capes are light, comfortable and waterproof; they're also breathable and would keep you cool in the summer but protect from cold winter winds, too. Hoods are lined in lightweight wool tartan or check.

Some of the garden items the Carrier Company stocks include a flower arranger carrier, garden kneelers, tool belts, aprons, vegetable storage sacks, canvas bags for keeping caught fish and garden cushions. There are also unstuffed dog beds.

The  order will usually be dispatched within a week and you have the option to pay in Pounds, US Dollars or Euros.

The Mertz Library, a part of the New York Botanical Garden website, has constructed an online exhibit that offers a timely subject: Winter Fruits and Flowers.

"Fruits and Flowers of Winter features items drawn from the Mertz Library’s rare books, folios, archival materials, manuscripts, and original artwork, exploring the pageantry of winter’s beauty.

"In 1712, Joseph Addison, an English essayist wrote in his a daily paper, The Spectator, an article introducing the concept of the all-green winter garden whose 'trees only as never cast their leaves.' Addison contrived a winter garden saying, 'there is something unspeakably cheerful in a spot of ground which is cover’d with trees that smile amidst all the rigour of winter, and give us a view of the most gay season . . .' "

"The exhibition features more than 60 splendid works of botanical illustration that brighten and illuminate the season. Seventeenth-century items illustrate advances in hothouse construction, enabling the growth of fruits and flowers indoors in winter. Exotic plants collected for local and foreign trade during this period of exploration enriched the collections of botanical gardens and private horticulturists. A rare post revolutionary era New York City plantsman’s account ledger provides a glimpse of the number of exotic ornamentals from Europe and Asia, recently brought into the trade, and being kept the winter for a fee."

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Many garden but few gardeners have the power to reach into the future to shape landscape style and fashion. Gertrude Jekyll, Mien Ruys, Geoffrey Jellicoe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Max, and Edwin Lutyens are just some of the extraordinary gardeners from the last century who influence today’s garden design.

Andrew Wilson introduces 56 of them in Influential Gardeners; The Designers Who Shaped 20th-Century Garden Style (Clarkson Potter, 2003), transporting readers through photographs and scholarly text into the designers’ ideas and gardens.

Wilson has the perfect background for the task: He teaches the professional diploma course in Garden Design Studies at the world-famous Ichbald School of Design in London and was the chairman of the Society of Garden Designers. Wilson tackled this daunting task by organizing the designers by their primary focus — color and decoration, plants, concept, form, structure, texture, and materials. An introduction to each section provides an overview of the times. More detailed essays about the individual designers follow, providing just enough information to whet one’s appetite. The result is an encyclopedic reference to garden design.

From Linda Coyner's review of Influential Gardeners; The Designers Who Shaped 20th-Century Garden Style

Please refer to Linda Coyner's articles for many more links

• Blue Poppy Garden - The store and B&B is located in Sedgwick, Maine, overlooking the Benjamin River and Eggemoggin Reach and sells gardening books, tools, garden antiques and objects for the garden, as well as a wide variety of linens, pottery, soaps and other imported items. The store also mail-orders blue poppy plants and seeds to its customers and does flower arranging, too. Their pots are varied and interesting. For example, Mrs. Gaskell's Wide-Bottom Seedpan and frillies. The bookstore filled with instructive and hard-to-find books in addition to the Taylor's Guides.

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