December Celebrations for All

  • Post published:12/30/2017
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December celebrations for all. Today is December 23. The Hanukkah celebration has concluded, Christmas is two days away, and Kwanzaa is three days away. December is a month of celebrations with traditions that lead us through the days. As I prepared for our own family Christmas I suddenly realized that the celebration of each of these holidays involves plants, plants which are essential in one way or another. Hanukkah is a moveable feast because, like Christian Easter, it…

New Books on Wellness, in the Garden and Kitchen

  • Post published:12/22/2017
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December is a season for new Books, great for gift giving. Shawna Coronado has shared her gardening expertise in many ways on TV, on lecture tours and in her books like Grow a Garden Wall: Create Vertical Gardens with a Purpose, but in her new book The Wellness Garden she shares her own history with painful osteoarthritis and how she learned to change her lifestyle for better health. The Wellness Garden: Grow, Eat and Walk Your Way to…

Trees – For Beauty and Benefit

  • Post published:12/16/2017
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Here in New England we can take trees for granted. Trees line our streets, our roads, and our highways. We do not have to work hard to find a woodland that invites us to stroll and enjoy a period of cool tranquility. The Japanese even have a word, Shinrin-yoku, or ‘forest bathing,’ for the practice of taking a walk in the woods for the health benefits it brings. And yet, many of us are not familiar with the…

Merry Christmas and a Year of Happy Days

We officially moved into our Greenfield house on October 24, 2015, just in time to stock up on bags of candy for the 100+ children - mostly very young children - who showed up in princess and ninja attire on Halloween. The celebrations had begun. No longer could we go out into the field to cut  our own tree, but we were happy to shop at the open air market on Main Street and buy a beauty. This…

Houseplants in Print and in Pots

  • Post published:12/09/2017
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Houseplants: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Growing and Caring for Indoor Plants by Lisa Eldred Steinkopf (Cool Springs Press $30) has a cool green and white cover

Then and Now – I Celebrate My 10th Blogaversary

Today I celebrate another blogaversary. Ten years ago I inaugurated my commonweeder blog. As a reader and a gardener I enjoyed the little play on words as the commonWEEDER and opposed to Virginia Woolf's CommonREADER books of essays. I had the most basic of ideas about what a blog was, but a good friend who knows more about such things said  I needed a blog. I acknowledged in my first post that I did not know what was…

Secret Gardeners, Naturalists, and Wild Seeds

  • Post published:12/01/2017
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The Secret Gardeners – Britain’s Creatives Reveal Their Private Sanctuaries by Victoria Summerley with photographs by Hugo Rittson Thomas (Francis Lincoln $45) is a glamorous armchair tour of beautiful gardens created such creative people as Sir Richard Branson, Julian Fellowes, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rupert Everett, Sting and 20 other familiar and not so familiar British stars. Most of us don’t think we are engaged in garden design when we go out to plant a perennial bed or plant…