Taxodium in home landscapes...

Why don’t we use more bald and pond cypresses (Taxodium spp.) in residential landscapes? I took the photograph above of a house landscaped with Taxodium on a recent house tour in New Orleans. Limbed up, these tall narrow trees fits the space by the driveway and by the street. Here in New Hampshire, I group two bald cypresses (T. distichum) with dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides ‘Ogon’) and giant Petasites for a dramatic, primeval effect. In leaf, these deciduous conifers have fine-textured foliage and cast light shade.  Pond cypress grows...

“Tosca” and my fall garden...

In the Puccini opera “Tosca,” the artist Cavaradossi’s garden stands for love, beauty, desire, lushness, and passion. It’s the place where Cavaradossi and Tosca, the opera singer, first embraced. I’ve been thinking about this garden ever since seeing the Boston Lyric Opera production yesterday afternoon. I imagine that the artist’s garden, neither pictured nor described in the opera, is formal in outline and overblown in its proportions. At the BLO, Cavaradossi (tenor Richard Crawley) and Floria Tosca (soprano Jill Gardner) expressed...