Working in the garden in the pouring rain isn’t my favorite pastime but Sunday was an exception.  Friend and fellow hort head, Richie Steffen, curator of the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle, came down to  help us build a stumpery in our back garden. So you ask –what is a stumpery? The name infers something unsavory but this garden structure is lovely, naturalistic  hold-over from the Victorian era.  Victorians crafted stumps, driftwood, logs, rotting wood and bark into artful three dimensional garden features.  Ferns, lichens, moss and woodland perennials are planted in crevices between the logs, in rotted … Continue Reading