Editor in chief
Rowena Bell
Rowena Bell trained at the RHS Garden Wisley and has kept her own kitchen garden in Devon for twenty-eight years. She edits Wintergreen Quarterly.
Beats
Published in Wintergreen Quarterly
The Quiet Case for Mulching with Straw
Rowena Bell makes a deliberate, undecorated argument for straw mulch in the home kitchen garden, after twenty-eight years of testing every other option.
Wireworms in a New Potato Bed
Rowena Bell on the small orange larvae that turned up in a first-year potato bed converted from old pasture, and the three-year plan to undo the problem.
The Monastery Garden at Clonfert
Behind a Cistercian wall in east Galway, three brothers and one lay sister grow a year's worth of vegetables on roughly half an acre, and have done since 1971.
The Overwintered Fig in a Cool Glasshouse
Rowena Bell visits a 1908 Victorian glasshouse in Kent where the same Brown Turkey fig has fruited every year since 1949, and considers what the tree teaches.
Lovage, the Forgotten Celery of the Cottage Garden
A tall, intemperate, deeply useful perennial that almost no one grows.
The Long Border at Great Dixter Through the Seasons
Rowena Bell spends four visits across one calendar year at the celebrated Sussex border, reading what changes and what holds.
A Tea Garden of Six Perennial Herbs
A small bed in north Yorkshire, six plants, and a year of kettles.
How to Read Leaf Damage by the Bite
A close examination of the marks left on bean, brassica, and apple leaves through a single July week in Devon, and what each pattern actually tells the gardener.
What the First True Leaves Tell You
Two weeks after germination, the seedling becomes itself. A close look at the diagnostic moment in the propagator.
A Good Pair of Bypass Pruners, Three Brands Over a Season
Felco, Niwaki, and ARS, carried in rotation through a working Devon garden from April to October, and what the cuts looked like at the end of it.
A Lean-to Greenhouse Against a South Wall in Wales
Rowena Bell visits a stone-walled lean-to in Ceredigion that has been in continuous use since 1962, and finds the bones of a working greenhouse and the gardener who keeps it.
An Afternoon at Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden
In late May the Elmstead Market beds are at their driest and most generous, and the lessons in the gravel still read clearly thirty-five years on.
Cover Cropping a 25-by-40 Plot in Autumn
Rowena Bell sows winter rye and crimson clover into a tired Devon kitchen garden, and waits seven months for the soil to answer.
A Year in a 12-by-16 Vegetable Bed in Zone 6
Rowena Bell follows a small kitchen plot in the Berkshires through twelve months of weather, succession, and quiet revisions.