Marie Viljoen

1 week ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

When the linden trees bloom, in scented New York City, it is time to make linden flower tea. Up, down, across the country (and across the temperate Northern Hemisphere), species of Tilia begin to flower in early and midsummer. Clustered and pale, their petals like ivory wax, the flowers are ready to be gathered and dried for linden tea when they are open and heavily scented.

2 weeks ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

When I signed up for a Citizen Pruners course in 2022 to qualify me to care for the street trees of New York City, I could not have foreseen that by 2025 two key tree programs for the city would have been axed. Street trees cool us quietly, extending their branches over tarmac and concrete, shading the sweltering summer grid. Their pools of shade interrupt wide, hot avenues. Their cathedraled arches meet above narrower streets. There is the marbled, urban-camouflage bark of plane trees in winter.

2 weeks ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

Sea kale is a robust and peppery brassica that grows wild on its rocky home shores of the British Isles and the North Sea. The salt-tolerant vegetable was popular in Victorian England. In the fledgling United States, Thomas Jefferson grew it at Monticello, forcing it beneath pots, which blanched the leaves and encouraged early growth before spring arrived. Today, in the US, sea kale is more likely to be seen in shoreline landscape design than in vegetable gardens.

3 weeks ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

Well before summer hits its often-humid stride, three enchanting spring phlox species offer months of flowers, from the beginning of that budding season through early summer. Woodland phlox, creeping phlox, and moss phlox are distinct spring phlox species that offer bursts of color in tricky places. They precede (by months) the more stately garden phlox—tall and showy in late summer and early fall, but often prone to mildew in muggy climates.

1 month ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

The sunbirds of Cape Town are to the local flowers (and humans) what hummingbirds are in the Americas: Small, bright, enchanting, and impossibly photogenic, but less impossible to photograph (thankfully, sunbirds perch to feed on nectar, rather than hovering, like their American counterparts). A sunbird safari is my only-slightly-tongue-in-cheek answer to the great safari quest of so many tourists in South Africa. The only people who say they are going on safari are tourists.