A rose, Zéphirine Drouhin, against a black background

What Do Gardens and Murder Have in Common?

Writers have long plotted murder mysteries in gardens of all sorts. What makes these fertile grounds for detective fiction?
Mother and daughters planting flowers in a backyard

Five Ways To Help the Environment While in Lockdown

We can’t be wandering outside much right now, but there are still ways to go green.
Potted herbs sitting on a windowsill

Three Ways to Turn Your Apartment into a Sustainable Garden

Even the smallest city dwelling has enough space for a mini-meadow or a few flower pots.
A gardener planting yellow flowers in the soil.

Five Steps to Making Your Garden a Carbon Sink

If the 81 million U.S. households with yards adopt these practices, they could absorb more carbon and help combat climate change.
Poster shows Uncle Sam playing a fife, leading a group of children carrying gardening tools and a seed bag.

The First School Gardens

In the early 1900s, immigration and child labor laws resulted in growing numbers of schoolchildren. Gardens were seen as a way to keep them under control.
Geranium

Why Victorian Gardeners Loathed Magenta

For decades, British and American gardeners avoided magenta flowers. The color had associations with the unnatural and the poisonous.
Susan Fenimore Cooper bluebird

Susan Fenimore Cooper, Forgotten Naturalist

Susan Fenimore Cooper, known as her father James Fenimore Cooper's secretary, is now being recognized as one of the nation's first environmentalists.
Sheffield Radishes

Community Gardens Were All the Rage…in the 1700s

An eighteenth-century precedent for today's community gardens in Sheffield, England.
Garden view "The House of the Seven Gables", Salem, Mass. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Garden view "The House of the Seven Gables", Salem, Mass." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 10, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-9dc0-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

A Garden of One’s Own

As the suburbs emerged in the 19th century, middle-class women, barred from waged labor, took to their gardens to remain productive. 
Astronauts on the International Space Station are ready to sample their harvest of a crop of "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce from the Veggie plant growth system that tests hardware for growing vegetables and other plants in space.
Credits: NASA

Gardening in Space

Zero-gravity gardening: why growing plants in space isn't the same as here on Earth.