The weekend of July 9 is going to be busy. A festival of garden and artisan tours will be on offer. The Hawley Artisan's & Garden Tour, sponsored by the Sons and Daughters of Hawley is billed as "A Collage of Art and Gardens." One of my favorite gardens is Jerry Sternstein's vegetable garden that is much more lush than mine - and has a fabulous view. Other Hawley gardens have perennial borders and blooming shrubs, but many…
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It rained heavily all Monday night and continued lightly through the morning. Then the temperatures plummeted to 24 degrees. When I went out to my car at 11 am it was covered with ice, and all the locks and doors were frozen tight. I wasn't going anywhere. At 3 pm the sun began to shine brilliantly. It turned the trees and shrubs into crystal sculptures. Happily, even though the temperatures were still in the low 20s, the ice…
My father was a machinist. For many years he worked for my grandfather, Algot Larson who invented the Unique window balance, a device that replaced the ropes and pulleys that were used at the time to open and shut windows. My father's avocation was astronomy. He was a member of the Amateur Astronomer's Association. He often attended meetings at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City where he learned to make his own telescope grinding the lens himself. I remember him melting…
While the northeast is blanketed in snow and ice, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amazing flowers made of glass are blooming at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In a darkened room on the third floor of the museum, glass cases sparkle, carefully lit to best show off grasses with their seed heads, delicate wildflowers, cocao plant and seed, one of the economically important plants on display, and more familiar flowers like rhododendron, mountain laurel, iris and dahlia. Each…
I have no affection for groundhogs, but Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies. Made in 1993 it has come to be lauded as one of the best movies ever made. "The film is number thirty-four on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Funniest Movies, and was named the number eight Fantasy film inAFI's 10 Top 10. Roger Ebert has revisited it in his "Great Movies" series. After giving it a three-star rating in his original review, Ebert acknowledged in…
This statue of Janus which stands at the entry to a woodland path at Tower Hill Botanic Garden seems perfect for an early January post. In this classical statue of the god of doorways and new beginnings, it is an old man who looks backward to the past, but a young man who looks forward to a new year with all its promise and challenge. On my solitary walk through the shady woods on that very hot summer…
The Walking exhibit at the Art Garden in Shelburne Falls has closed but I am carrying the image of this joyful road by Pamela Snow and Ursula Snow with me as I start on the road to the holidays, beginning today when I set up the Silent Auction for Holiday Village at the Charlemont Federated Church. The Silent Auction will have everything up for bid from bags of Donovan's potatoes, blown glass, gorgeous jewels, and passes for the Zoar Outdoor…
I'm not sure if this really counts as the First Snowfall for Garden Bloggers, but snow surely did fall out of the sky last night. Yesterday around noon - all of a sudden - the sky turned black and the wind whipped up the leaves to such an extent that I could hardly see across the drive. Then slush fell out of the sky for five minutes. The weatherman called it hail, but it didn't do the kind…
Richard Richardson turned his grief over the passings of his brother and daughter into a magical garden that is now open to the public. The Three Sisters Sanctuary, right next to Richardson's business Good Time Stoves in Goshen, has been in the making for 18 years. The story of the garden is now told on its own website, along with information about events like concerts and plays, and how you can hold your own event in this amazing…