For 25 years, I've gardened in Heath, Massachusetts at End of the Road Farm, talking to other gardeners, reading, thinking, learning and writing about it in my column, Between the Rows, in the Recorder (Greenfield, MA). Some of that work is collected here, as well as my pieces from other publications. Read on!
Pat Leuchtman
Spring
Mysterious Daffodils: Two springs ago daffodils began blooming in the fields alongside Route 2 between Charlemont and Shelburne Falls. Where did they come from? Daffodils are not usually planted among the alfalfa, even at the edges of hayfields....
Wisteria: In 1990 I bought a wisteria, and my husband and son built an arbor over the piazza in front of our house. Unfortunately those two events happened in that order. The wisteria arrived in May while the arbor was still being planned. It went into a pot and stayed there until August...
A Passion for Delphiniums: Who can explain a horticultural passion? My love for old fashioned roses began just before we moved to Heath in 1979 and is owed to Katherine White's description of a rose catalog – not even the roses, exactly...
The Common Dandelion: The days are longer and warmer as the sun shines down on us. That sun is repeated hundreds of time on our lawns and the country roadsides where brilliant golden dandelions and coltsfoot are blooming....
Gates and Art: Several people I know have traveled to Central Park in New York to see the Christo installation of 7500 bannered Gates winding along 23 miles of park trails and pathways looking like a rippling orange river, or brilliant dominoes ready to be toppled....
Walt Cudnohufsky - Landscape Architect: This spring I was privileged to sit in on some of the landscape design sessions that Walt Cudnohufsky holds for working designers. Cudnohufsky, founder of the Conway School of Landscape Design...
A New Entry: Lynn Perry and Rol Hesselbart, my neighbors in Heath, are a thoughtful couple. For ten years they have been thinking and thinking about adding a garage with storage space to their little house, halfway down a hillside. More than a year ago, they got serious...
Butterfly Gardens: When we made our plans to make our first visit to Texas where our daughter Kate and her family moved last summer we knew that we would get an early taste of spring... After school one day we joined 8 year old grandson Drew in his school’s butterfly garden....
Winter
Peterkin Model of Weed Study: Recently I replaced my lost copy of The Peterkin Papers by Lucretia P. Hale, a book that was a favorite of mine when my children were young. The Peterkins were a family that seemed to get themselves into an amazing number of confusing situations...
My Summer in a Garden: “The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mudpies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.” I first read these words a number of years ago while wandering in the stacks at the Williams College Library...
The Groundhog:Yesterday, February 2, was the day the whole United States celebrated the groundhog. TV cameras were set to watch Punxsutawney Phil come out of his burrow to determine whether or not spring is upon us, or whether we will have six more weeks of winter...