Beatrix Potter is known to almost every parent, but not as well known as her most famous creation, Peter Rabbit. In Marta McDowell’s new book Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life: the plants and places that inspired the classic children’s tales (Timber Press $24.95) we meet Peter’s progenitor. In 1890, the 24 year old Beatrix bought Benjamin Bouncer at a pet shop and used him as the model for Peter for some paintings that she sold. That was the…
Accessible healthy food is a basic human right. The Greenfield Community Farm helps insure this right to the Greenfield Community. The Greenfield Community Farm out on Glenbrook Road is actually comprised of four gardens. First, there is a production market garden, operated by grant-funded David Paysnick and his assistant Daniel Berry, that grows produce for sale through the Just Roots CSA, at the Farmers Market, and Green Fields Coop. This garden includes a greenhouse where seeds are started…
“I’m a designer. I’ve always been absorbed by fashion, interior and landscape design,” Marie Stella said when she began my tour of Beaver Lodge in Ashfield. Her current and ongoing design project is the landscape surrounding her beautiful house which has been give a Platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating. This is very unusual for a residence. LEED designations require that materials be as local as possible, that recycled materials be used when possible. For…
Last week I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to meet the noted landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburg and hear him speak about how he approached the challenge of redesigning the Monks Garden. He said that Isabella Stewart Gardener herself acknowledged that she was never satisfied with the small walled garden she called the Monks Garden. “That gave me the confidence and courage . . . to make a garden for the future of the Museum.” Certainly the…
PHOENIX by Xu Bing is on display at the Mass Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachussetts. It is very difficult to photograph the whole with a little point and hope camera. But the details of the construction debris that comprise these two magnificent birds can be appreciated. The Phoenix is a mythical immortal bird that rises from its own ashes. Xu Bing's Phoenixes. which will eventually fly in Beijing , symbolize the rise from greed and corruption…
On April 16, 1989 my husband and I flew to Beijing where I had taken a job with a women's magazine. There I first learned of International Women's Day where it is a big event. And certainly I learned a lot about the life of Chinese women while working as a 'polisher' for Women of China English Monthly. I worked with translators (whose English was excellent) who translated articles about women in China's history, and the women who were taking…
Where do the plants in our garden come from? How did plants get from the heights of the Himalayan mountains, or the Appalachian mountains, to our gardens? It would be hard to count the number of plants in our gardens that were first seen by the intrepid explorers of the last three centuries. John Bartram (1699-1777) of Philadelphia was possibly the first American botanist and plant hunter. Bartram was a farmer with little formal education, but he was…
The Cacao bean is native to South America, but it became the cocoa we are familiar with when the Dutch van Houten found a new processing method, and it was British George Cadbury in 1878 who created a model garden city of Bourneville for his chocolate workers. On this cold and snowy day I have been reading a beautiful and fascinating book, Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History by Bill Laws. Cocoa is popular drink around our house in…
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson can possibly be credited with starting the popular environmental movement. When the book was published in 1962 it was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month and was on the New York Times best seller for weeks. The book remains relevant today. The Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association is sponsoring a Reading Silent Spring Together program with three free talks by local experts with community discussion. There is no charge, but readers are asked to pre-register because…
Gertrudy Jekyll (1843-1932) was one of the great British gardeners. It is her gardens and writings that essentially define the British perennial garden to this day. This is the 169th anniversary of her birth in in London. Though she did travel throughout England, Europe and even the United States she spent most of her life in Surrey, England. There she built her final house and garden, Munstead Wood, with Edward Luytens, the well known architect.Most of the photographs show…