As I write I don’t know what Punxatawny Phil saw or said the other day. If he saw his shadow we will have a long winter. If he did not see his shadow we will have an early spring. February 2 is half way between the Solstice, the first and shortest day of winter, and the Spring Equinox, first day of spring when night and day are equal in length.  So since we are halfway to spring it…

I first became aware of something called permaculture quite some years ago. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to understand a word like that which includes the words permanent and agriculture. But, sad to say, I couldn’t figure it out. I spent some years of my childhood on a Vermont farm and there was nothing of a permanent nature that I could remember. The first book I found about permaculture was a hefty tome that described permaculture…

During the holiday season I do a lot of baking and cooking filling the house with spicy aromas.  When I received a beautiful box of baking spices as a Christmas gift I got to wondering how far these spices had to travel before they arrived in my kitchen. I was further intrigued by an article in the Sunday New York Times, The World’s History in a Clove Tree by Amitav Ghosh which urged me on to further investigations.…

My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner is one of the books I routinely turn to on dreary days of winter when the temperature resists going higher than freezing.  Here is what I had to say about the book back in 2002. “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…

When Billie Holiday sang “There’s a change in the weather/There’s a change in the sea/So from now on there’ll be a change in me,” she was casting off an unsatisfactory love affair, not singing about climate change, but the words fit our current global concerns. The climate is changing and the sea is rising.  No matter whether everyone agrees about the challenges ahead, there’ll be some changes made. As I stand here today meeting Janus, the Roman god…

Not all garden books are how-to-garden books. Some books for fun are filled with weird and wonderful facts, and others are full of beauty and history. One book sent to me by Storey Publishing last month is Cattail Moonshine & Milkweed Medicine: The Curious Stories of 43 Amazing North American Native Plants ($19.95) written by Tammi Hartung. Because milkweed was in the title I began by reading those pages. When we lived in New York City I was…