We started off at the Erie Basin Trial Gardens for the All America Selections (AAS). The AAS helps gardeners by rating seed varieties so they can find some of the best flowers and vegetables to plant from seed. We all loved this brilliant red dahlia.
Yellow orchids at the Buffalo & Erie Cty Botanical Gardens
Then it was off to the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens which has a fabulous glass conservatory, modeled after the one in Kew Gardens in England. This building opened in 1900. The Orchid House is only one of several specialty areas including an eipiphyte pavillion, a fern house and a desert house.
Cyndy from Gardening Asylum
Then we had to shop! Off to Lockwood’s Greenhouse. Cyndy of Gardening Asylum was glassy eyed and wilting by the time she finished. I bought a solar lantern for the garden.
Mary Ann who writes the Gardens of the Wild West, Boise to be precise, has a lot to say about how we have been spending our days. Check her out!
How has your garden changed in 30 years? How has your life changed in 30 years?
As a person who moved every two or three years (on average) for the first four sevenths of my life, I was stunned to realize that Henry and I have been in Heath for 30 years! And that means, that on May 22, today, I celebrate my 30th anniversary as garden columnist for The Recorder.
It was a happy day for me when Bob Dolan hired me to write a local garden column for the new Leisure tabloid section that The Recorder planned. The garden season was beginning and so was my first Heath garden. My plan that first spring was to put in a huge vegetable garden. We got one of our new neighbors to come and plow up a big section. I don’t remember the measurements, but it was more than we were able to plant. Do you think I have learned to make my garden a manageable size? Not really. Which means I sympathize with everyone who has big plans and little time.
Gardens inevitably change over time. Gardeners become more skilled. They develop new interests. They find new mentors. They meet other gardeners who give them plants they never dreamed of growing.
Guan Yin Mian tree peony
Sometimes travel changes the way a gardener approaches the garden. My first mentor was Elsa Bakalar with her British perennial borders. I accompanied her and a busload of enthusiastic gardeners on a tour of England gardens in 1983 and was entranced with perennials, and ‘garden rooms.’ I started my own perennial border. but realized that it takes special artistic skills (and time or hired labor) to have fantastic borders like those at the stately homes of Britain.
Queen Elizabeth grandiflora
Then Henry and I went to China where the gardens use a limited palette of plants, and very few of those at a time. In China the word for gardens, shan shui, means mountains and water. And ‘mountains’ in the garden often take the form of stones. When we returned from China, British borders began to look crowded and busy. My view of what was attractive was enlarged.
There are many climates, many landscapes, many types of gardens, many types of beauty, and each of us gets to discover our own preferences. Some know right away what kind of garden they want, and make up a master plan (with or without professional help) and proceed to implement that plan with little revision.
Others, like me, work on one project like The Rose Walk and then decide how to fit the next project in and around what already exists. I’ve often thought that if I knew what I liked and knew what I was doing 30 years ago, my gardens would be very different.
I named this column Between the Rows because our neighbor in Maine, Mr. Leslie, who had a great garden (and a wooden gas lawn mower that he contrived), said he was always ready to stop between the rows and swap a few lies. He knew that gardeners have as many tales as fishermen in their repertoire.
I hoped that this column would allow me to swap stories and information with other gardeners and talking to gardeners has been the main delight of this column I have seen beautiful and amazing gardens, small and large, and met the most fascinating, enthusiastic and knowledgeable people who are willing to share their knowledge – and their plants. Recently I have also been asked to take photographs to go along with my columns, so I’ve had a new learning curve.
Hoki tree peony on Bridge of Flowers
I’ve always known that gardeners are among the most generous of people, always happy to share a plant, or seeds, or a tip about how they do things. What has surprised me is how gardeners band together to provide service and beauty to their communities. The Greenfield Garden Club supports educational horticultural projects in the schools, and beautiful plantings throughout the town. The Bridge of Flowers committee oversees the upkeep of the Bridge which gives so much pleasure to us locals who work or run errands in Shelburne Falls, but it also attracts over 34,000 tourists – and those are just the ones who sign the guest book.
Gardeners singly and in groups are aware of the economic pressures on many families, making monetary donations to the various food pantries in the county, but also by Planting a Row for the Hungry and donating extra produce to local organizations.
Greeenfield Farmers Market
Since my first passion was organic vegetables I have been so happy to see the growing appreciation for fresh local vegetables and fruits – and the concurrent rise of small farms, farm stands, farmer’s markets and Community Supported Agriculture farms – CSAs.
As I’ve written about gardens and gardeners, I’ve learned about farms and farmers. I’ve learned about threats to our environment and the ways that we can all protect our precious soil, water and air.
People often ask me how I find something to say every week. I’ve learned that the more I write, the more gardeners, farmers, and issues I find to write about. I can only hope The Recorder will give me another 30 years to get through my list of people and topics.
If the Harrison’s yellow is blooming the mosquitoes will not be far behind. In the meantime I am making do with deer flies that have bitten and bitten. They are not as easy to swat and kill as mosquitoes that land and take their time to suck blood.
Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer – and poet. He bought a farm in Kentucky in 1965 and the main subject of his writings are about the beauty of nature, the agrarian values he holds dear, and the kind of good life that he believes is lived in small rural communities. I am with him all the way – and that is probably one reason I ended up in a little town like Heath.
My strategy
Wendell Berry knows and appreciates the problems of farming and rural life – which I contended with myself today. The day was spent in happy labors, planting tomatoes, three heirlooms my neighbor gave me and three Black Krim samples from Hort Couture, and Renees Garden beans, Emerite and French Gold. There were the deer flies to battle, but I was happy getting these plants and seeds in the ground. Henry dug the final garden bed, so there is still a little work to do.
I went back to the Shed Bed, finishing the weeding (almost, anyway) and planting my pathetic little cosmos seedlings. I found a piece of wire fencing that was just the right size to lay over the cosmos, just a few inches off the ground. It looks like a big plant support. The chickens can’t get under the fencing and they won’t hop on top so those seedlings are safe. However, as per my custom I then planted salvia seedlings around the edge of the bed. They are not protected by wire fencing and the chickens love freshly tilled soil. They knocked over two of the seedlings. I hope I can rescue them. The hens will not be allowed out to play tomorrow -or for a few more days.
Thank you Carolyn gail for hosting Muse Day at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago. I love to see the first of the month arrive.
Saturday I went into Greenfield to buy plants at the Greenfield Garden Club Plant sale, but also stopped at the Greenfield Farmers Market to buy beautiful lettuce from The Kitchen Garden for Gourmet Club, and I bought a pot of beautiful double white petunias from LaSalles.
Shoestring Farm Booth
The Farmers Market was full of vegetable starts, flats of annual seedlings, as well as the first greens of the season and huge bouquets of peonies from Hadley where spring has sprung to a greater degree than in Heath. Strolling among the Farmers Market booths my head is filled with fantasy visions of my own garden, equally productive and beautiful.
Shed Bed
When I got home I had to face the reality that I am still weeding and planting madly – and it is not a pretty sight. Some creature is daintily nibbling at the lettuce in the new Front Garden. That will require further investigation and thought. Somehow the Shed Bed of Roses, next to the henhouse, is incredibly full of weeds and grass this spring. I hadn’t made even one pass through when daughter Diane arrived on Sunday afternoon for a short visit. I immediately showed her the Shed Bed and we set to. She is such a cooperative and energetic daughter. I got to use my fabulous West Country Rose Gloves to prune and hold roses out of the way while Diane dug out grass and weeds. We noticed that the rose Mrs. Doreen Pike, a low rugosa with bright green foliage and pretty very double little blossoms, who had sent runners toward the back of the bed, had totally disappeared to the back of the bed leaving a big empty spot in the front. What to do? And how to handle that empty spot considering the location of the bed next to the henhouse?
Chickens! There is a fenced chicken yard, but a few adventurous birds routinely fly the coop for a day eating grass and bugs and taking ‘dust’ baths in the cultivated soil of the Shed Bed. Since I fear the dread ‘rose disease’ that spells certain doom for any rose planted where a rose lived before (at least for a couple of years) one solution to that empty space is a patch of annuals. Not good design, but functional. The problem is those chickens and their dust baths. I’m wondering if I can make a kind of cage out of chicken wire to put over the annual seedlings. The chickens won’t be able to dig them up and the annuals (maybe cosmos?) will grow up through the cage and pretty much hide it. It’s my only idea so far. What do you think?
Spring madness was in the air when I trekked to the New York Botanical Garden for the special exhibit Emily Dickinson’s Garden: Poetry in Flowers. Two rooms of the stunning Enid E. Haupt Conservatory were given over to interpretations of the gardens and Dickinson’s home, The Homestead, in Amherst.
While many of us have a vision of a slight, white clad woman quietly writing odd verses in her bedroom, seeing no one, Emily Dickinson’s early years were quite ordinary. She did not become reclusive until she was in her thirties. Her father was a prominent citizen of the town who served as treasurer of Amherst College for decades, as well as a state legislator and as a member of the U.S. Congress. The household was busy and engaged in the social life of the town.
Born in 1830 Emily, and her sister Lavinia, attended school at the Amherst Academy, and later attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Throughout her girlhood she suffered from health problems, and it was poor health that ended her attendance at Mount Holyoke after only a year.
In spite of her poor health, the family deaths that occurred while she was young, and the view of the Amherst cemetery from the Homestead’s windows, her life was not drenched in sorrow. Emily grew up in a busy family, in a handsome pale yellow house, amid flower and vegetable gardens and once declared, “I was reared in a garden, you know.”
In fact she studied botany, and when she was only 11 she began putting together an herbarium that ultimately included 400 plants, each labeled and identified with its proper Latin name. A beautiful facsimile of this herbarium was created and published by Belknap Press of Harvard University; the original resides in Harvard’s Houghton Library.
Dickinson gardened all her life, caring for roses, lilacs, tulips, zinnias, foxgloves, sweet Williams and poppies as well as all the bulbs that bloom in the spring. When the family was prosperous enough a small conservatory (now gone) was added to the house. Plantings there included a fig tree and other tender and exotic plants.
All these and more are included in the lush plantings in the Conservatory. I was particularly taken with the recreation of the well traveled path between The Homestead and The Evergreens, the house her brother Austin built for his family next door. Of course the Conservatory staff has the skill to bring flowers from a whole season into bloom at the same time, peonies with roses, delphiniums with foxgloves, columbine with morning glories.
Set among the plantings are little placards with appropriate poems including all the creatures that visit the garden including birds, and bees. Only 18 of Dickinson’s poems were published during her lifetime. It is only after her death that her sister found the little booklets in a drawer – the more than 1700 poems her sister had written and organized.
One of the poems set among the flowers shows a more positive feeling about fame than I ever imagined she possessed.
“Fame is a bee.
It has a song –
It has a sting –
Ah, too, it has a wing.
That poem strikes me as wistful, a peek at Dickinson imagining a different world for herself if she had found fame. Yet another poem with its black cawing crow presents a very different picture of fame and its consequences.
“Fame is a fickle food
Upon a a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die.”
Fame did come to Emily Dickinson, but not until many years after her death in 1886. She is now considered a major American poet. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. By R.W. Franklin have been published by the Belknap Press of Harvard. The exhibit in the Conservatory gives an idea of the joys and inspiration Dickinson found in the garden.
Nearby the Conservatory is a Poetry Walk with 30 Poetry Boards featuring some of Dickinson’s poems about flowers and the garden.
Dickinson's garden included vegetables
A further exhibit is on display in the NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery will showcase items reveal the context of her life. It should be noted that Jane Wald, Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum is a key member of the Curatorial Team that put this exhibit together.
The exhibit will continue at the NYBG until June 13. On Saturday, June 12 from 10am to 6 pm visitors are invited to read their own favorite Dickinson poems aloud, and on Sunday, Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson will give a talk about Dickinson’s Eden” at 4 pm.
Even if you can’t nip down to the exhibit, we have the Emily Dickinson Museum in our own backyard, and there is a whole raft of beautiful and fascinating books about Emily, her garden, and an imagined life in the novel I Never Came to You in White, also by Judith Farr.
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One place to spruce up our own individual Edens, is the Bridge of Flowers Plant Sale next Saturday, May 22, from 9 am to noon at the Green at the corner of Main and Water Streets. In addition to a wonderful selection of perennials, and annuals, the following vendors will be on hand: Nancy Dole Books; OESCO, Michael Naldrett’s photo notecards; Steve Earp’s pottery; and John Sendelbach’s garden art.
On Tuesday, my friend Le Flaneur and I went to the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx to see the exhibit Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. Two large rooms in the Enid Haupt Conservatory were given over to an interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s garden at The Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is only about 45 miles from us in Heath. There were wonderful plantings of the flowers that grew in her garden, some of which inspired her poetry. The exhibit will run until June 13. It has everything, flowers, veggies, poetry and history.
I didn’t see any poetry about red nicotiana, but I can understand why Emily and other gardeners plant it. In our climate we treat it as an annual, but the sweet fragrance is all the reason one needs to include this somewhat leggy, sprawly plant. Nicotiana, sometimes called flowering tobacco, is related to the kind of tobacco that you smoke, but it is also a member of the Solanaceae family which means it is related to deadly nightshade, tomatoes and eggplant.
After spending happy hours at the Emily exhibit which included A Poetry Walk that included many of her poems inspired by the garden and the natural world, and a quick tour of the Rose Garden where a few roses were just beginning to bloom, we set off for Arthur Avenue just a few blocks away. Arthur Avenue is a kind of Little Italy – good food! One of the more exotic emporiums gave space to four cigar makers, rolling tobacco leaves into very nice cigars. I guess this store figures after a wonderful meal, the men will want a good cigar – and they want to supply that too.
Tobacco is native to the New World and was smoked only on ceremonial occasions. When Europeans learned about tobacco they quickly decided that it could be sold in their home countries and used recreationally in snuff, and for smoking.
I am not a smoker – and I prefer the sweet fragrance of flowering nicotiana.
So many groups hold plant sales in the spring. They give us a chance to expand our gardens AND often support any number of worthy community organizations.
Nasami Farm of the New England Wildflower Society is now open in Whately on weekends, Thursdays through Sundays from 10 am – 5 pm. until June 13. Nasami sells native plants that will thrive in our area, support birds, bees and butterflies – and our whole eco-system.
Friday, May 7 9 am – 3 pm Durfee Conservatory at UMass. Annual Spring Plant sale of annuals for sun and shade. Proceeds go to support the Conservatory. Questions? Call (413) 545-5234. For a map of the UMass campus, go to http://www.umass.edu/visitorsctr/Campus_Map/
Saturday, May 8 9-12 noon. The Leverett Historical Society will be holding its Annual Plant Sale again at the Leverett Town Hall on Sat. May 8 9-12 noon. This year they will also be having a used garden book sale in addition to the plants. Dawn Ward will be available as a Master Gardener to give advice for choices and care of plants. Rain or Shine. Please call 367-9562 for futher info or donations prior to sale. Saturday and Sunday, May 8 and 9 am – 5 pm. Rain or Shine. Wilder Hill Gardens Spring Dig Sale. Buy directly from the field, directly from the garden. www.wilderhillgardens.comOver 40 varieties of hardy heirloom perennials, $6 each, but only during this sale. Lilian R. Jackman 625-9446.
Saturday, May 22 9 am – 12 noon. Bridge of Flowers Annual Plant Sale Rain or Shine. Sale is held on the green at the corner of Water and main Streets in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. This sale, one of the oldest and best plant sales in the area includes perennials dug from the famous Bridge of Flowers, divisions from the gardens of skilled local gardeners, and a selection of annuals. For information about the Bridge and the sale logon to www.bridgeofflowersmass.org. Sale supports the Bridge of Flowers.
Saturday, May 29 8 am -1 pm. The Greenfield Garden Club Spring Extravaganza. 8 am – 1 pm. Plants, and a garden tag sale at the Trap Plain Garden at the corner of Silver and Federal Streets. Sale supports community and educational projects of the club.
Yesterday my husband, Henry, and I went out to The Curtis House in Ashfield to film a session with Gloria Pacosa of Gloriosa & Co. and Trillium Workshops fame for the Shelburne Falls Cable TV show Over The Falls. The subject was how to make beautiful container plantings. Mine is the red arrangement and Gloria’s is one of fifteen herbal containers that she is making for a wedding next weekend. The show will be aired first on May 14.
We talked about everything beginning with what kinds of containers are available. Clay pots, plain and fancy are classic, but they do dry out quickly and special attention needs to be paid to watering. Plastic, resin and new fangled materials sometimes mimic ornate stone containers at moderate prices. They also dry out at a slower rate but all container plantings must be watered every day. Gloria, the Queen of Recycling, is always looking for throwaways to use from pretty china teacups for muscari, to rusty old egg baskets like this one that she lined with moss, harvested from her lawn and the woods, inserted a plastic bag to hold potting soil and then filled with a great selection of plants combining silvery and red foliage.
There are many recipes for potting mixes online. I usually buy a commercial mix, but I always add a helping of compost. In addition to being kept well watered, containers must be kept fertilized. Fish emulsion is good, and Gloria said I could put all the comfrey in my backyard to good use by chopping it up and letting it steep in a pail or barrel of water for a few days. I have LOTS of comfrey. Comfrey tea is very nutritious and good for plants.
My own container began with a bright red dahlia. Then Gloria helped me choose other plants to go with it. Basil and a variegated sage added light bright green foliage, red salvia was a good compliment to the dahlia and then came what I thought was a bold move, the coral dascia. Wow! I would never have been able to do this myself, but Gloria has given me new confidence – just what every good teacher does. I also took hydrated moss from Gloria’s collection and ‘mulched’ the top of the container. This gives the arrangement an elegant finished look. To keep the container looking its best all summer I will have to keep the plants deadheaded. They will grow taller and will fade. Cut them back! Gloria was quite insistent. Shear the dascia! To get more dahlias keep deadheading.
I can’t put this outside yet because it is too cold, but in a couple of weeks it should be safe. It will be really happy on my very sunny piazza. In the meantime it is is our bright, unheated Great Room.
Tulips of many colors and hues are in full bloom on Shelburne Falls’ Bridge of Flowers. It’s enough to make one stop – or at least slow down – to enjoy the day and be grateful to live in such an area where going about one’s duties and errand running brings one this kind of pleasure. And don’t forget you can add a little bit of the Bridge to your own garden by buying a plant or two at the Annual Plant Sale on May 22. Nine a.m.!
Viburnam
The woods are also beginning to bloom. Even when my errands take me through the hills I look around and see woodland foliage attaining more definition and leaf buds unfurl in ruddy shades of maple, tender green and the bright yellow green of willows. Everywhere I go, magnolias, cherries and trees I can’t even identify are blooming in yards, along the Deerfield River, and at the edges of pastures. Crabapples are just beginning to bloom. Trees, tulips, daffodils – bloom is bustin’ out all over.
At home, bees are buzzing in the wild plum trees that grow around the hen house. I am reminded that I need to get busy as a bee. This week I spent a happy morning moving rotted horse manure from my neighborly supplier and into various garden beds. I pruned roses and planted roses: Hawkeye Belle (pink) on the Rose Bank, and Prairie Harvest (yellow) and Quietness (pale pink) on the Rose Walk. All three are hardy Griffith Buck hybrids. I also ripped out Pamela, a pink rugosa that was too much like Scabrosa. I put a couple of the shoots on the Rose Bank and gave the greater part to neighbors who have no roses. Yet. My husband revved up the tractor and pulled out a nearly dead spirea – too far gone to try and save. Now I have a beautiful open spot in a Lawn Bed that was looking too crowded.
Trillium Workshop - Planting Containers
The lasagna Front Garden is now completed and I planted my own lettuce and broccoli seedlings in the new bed. Then I celebrated by attending a Trillium Workshopsprogram on planting containers. The three Trillium gardeners, Jeff Farrell, Lisa Newman and Gloria Pacosa, gave a group of excited gardeners information about options in containers, how to make potting mixes, how to keep container plantings alive – and then we all dug in. So to speak. We had brought planters and Trillium supplied a whole range of seedlings, annuals, herbs, dahlias – and ideas. One of the participants noticed that all of the completed and very different arrangements looked great. Which just goes to show that there are many aesthetic approaches and many ways to make something beautiful. Thank you Trillium!
Last Sunday was muddy and dreary but the group that gathered in front of the blazing fire at Curtis House in Ashfield was as bright and sunny as a summer day. We had all gathered to have Jeff Farrell, Gloria Pacosa and Lisa Newman, the newly formed Trillium Workshops, teach us how we could all have cutting gardens to fill our houses with fresh flowers while leaving our flower borders intact.
These three friends came together hardly more than a month ago to share their collective knowledge and experience and to have some fun. It all began when Pacosa, a floral designer and owner of the multi-faceted Gloriosa and Co. (www.gloriosaco.com), called Ashfield friend and neighbor Jeff Farrell and asked him to help with a cooking event. He said he couldn’t cook but he could help with gardening.
Hmmmmm. That started the wheels turning and they quickly called Newman and before they knew it they had a name, a list of programs they could offer, and a website, where they could promote them. “This is kind of guerilla organizing,” Newman said. “We have no shortage of ideas! We decided to just do it.”
The list of workshops calls on skills they all possess. Farrell is a skilled professional gardener and garden consultant. He currently tends 12 gardens including the garden in Heath that belongs to Northampton artist Scott Prior, previously owned by Elsa Bakalar. At the beginning of his career Farrell worked for several years with Elsa Bakalar and he has arranged three tours of that garden giving gardeners a chance to see the interesting and varied progression of bloom beginning on June 20, and later in July and September.
I met Gloria Pacosa years ago when I worked at Artspace (then called the Arts Council) and was impressed with her sense of design and exquisite craftsmanship, all in evidence at the cutting garden workshop.
The vivacious Lisa Newman grew up gardening and has spent her professional life in publishing, but often connected with gardens, scouting for gardens and organizing photo shoots for various publications like Horticulture and other magazines and book publishers. She gets to test and review new tools and equipment. A good person to know!
I wanted to attend this workshop because flower arranging has never been my forte. I put a bunch of peonies or autumn branches in a vase and call it a day. I needed Trillum.
Now I already know that perennials have a fairly short period of bloom, and I know a few annuals like zinnias and cosmos, but I never seemed to be able to put together a pretty bouquet or arrangement. The Trillium crew anticipated my ignorance and handed out lists of annuals, perennials, herbs and shrubbery and even vegetables that can be used in flower arrangements. Suddenly I realized I had many more plants in my garden that I could use, without even buying more seeds or starts, but I am never one to pass up a chance to buy more plants.
Some good annuals for arrangements are Bells of Ireland, pot marigolds, cosmos, delphiniums, love in a mist, snapdragons, snapdragons, sunflowers and salvias. You can use any perennials that are in bloom at a given moment, but I had never thought of pea vines, kale, chard, and dill from the vegetable garden as bouquet material. Foliage from oakleaf hydrangea, cotinus, and Diabolo ninebark which have dramatic dark leaves are useful additions.
Mid-arrangement
After getting answers to our own garden problems, and a delicious tea time, Pacosa put together a beautiful arrangement in a pretty little tag sale bowl. That was an important tip for me. If you have inexpensive containers you can make an arrangement and give it away without worrying about reclaiming the vase.
I also learned from the demonstration that I haven’t been using floral foam correctly. It needs to be soaked ahead of time! I never knew. After the foam was in the bowl she topped it with moss from the lawn she had harvested last fall and stored in her basement. Branches of dark leaved azalea and pink stocks from the supermarket were the main ingredients. “I love pink and brown in arrangements,” Pacosa said.
Gloria's arrangment - fini!
After she even more quickly put together another very different arrangement in a tall vase it was clear she is never stymied.
For full information about additional workshops, April 25 – Container Design and Planting; May 16 – Daffodil Workshop; and May 22 – Creating an Outdoor Garden Room for Entertaining and relaxing as well as short demonstrations in the Curtis House garden on Saturday mornings while the Ashfield Farmer’s Market is in operation logon to www.trilliumworkshops.blogspot.com.
Other interesting and informative meetings are coming up. The Franklin County Giant Pumpkin Growers are meeting on Tuesday, March 30 at Turner’s Falls High School at 7 pm in Room 206. If you are interested in competitive pumpkin growing this is place to learn how to do it. Call Lu or Sue Chadwick, 773-3283, for more information.
Ed Himlan, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Watershed Coalition, will be at the Greenfield Public Library on Tuesday, April 6 at 6:30 pm to give a free presentation about the benefits of rain gardens, and how to plant and create one of your own. This program is organized by Greening Greenfield, and co-sponsored by many local organizations. ###
We moved to our windy hill in Heath, Massachusetts 29 years ago. We considered our climate to be Zone 4, but now I think Zone 5 might be more accurate... Read more...
Annuals, Bloggers, Garden Tours, Perennials | Pat July 10, 2010 | 
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