About Moira Sheridan

Thousands of commuters zoom along Pennsylvania Avenue to and from work each day.  How many realize they are flying by two botanical treasures situated across the street from each other?  Goodstay Gardens, on the campus of the University of Delaware’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and Gibraltar, behind the tall stone walls at Greenhill and Pennsylvania [...]

What a beautiful mess.  Midsummer in the garden is at once colorful and chaotic, abundant and overwhelming.  Just as the perennial borders burst with flowers, the vegetable garden grows fulsome with ripening fruits.  Add to this luscious scenario an intrusive reality: suffocating weeds, marauding pests, and the unfinished business of early summer gardening.  The result [...]

It took me 21 years, but I finally made it to the annual Lewes Garden Tour last Saturday.  The eight properties reflected a theme of “hidden gardens” whose curb appeal only hinted at the treasures awaiting beyond the public view.  They didn’t disappoint, but neither did Lewes itself, a picturesque town whose charms are anything [...]

I have been watching the black swallowtail caterpillars slowly devour a dill plant next to my patio for over a week.  Within that time they’ve gone from dark specks to fat bands of black, yellow, and white, chewing the ferny foliage down to a skeletal stalk.  Most visitors walk right past that plant on their [...]

Bring on the heat and humidity.  Let it rain in sheets for a week and then dry our clay soil into concrete.  Watch the marauding insects chew through the crops.  Gardening season has arrived in Delaware and for all its vagaries, there’s nowhere else I’d rather sink a shovel. Despite our constant grumblings – “Can [...]