All hail the Winter Solstice, December 21, the shortest day of the year. The sun will only appear in the sky for 9 hours and 4 minutes. Winter has arrived. Snow covers the fields, and frigid winds blow. Nowadays people grumble about the shortness of the days and complain about seasonal depression. Yet we are able to turn on the lights and heat, put on some music, and go to a well-stocked pantry to get ready for supper.…
The dictionary defines the word gift as “Something that is bestowed voluntarily.” Sometimes, at this time of the year with Christmas garlands around every product in the supermarket, drugstore, department store and boutique there doesn’t seem to be much of the ‘voluntary’ available. And yet, sometimes a gift is not only truly voluntary, it is inspired, perfectly suited to the recipient at that particular moment, a gift that fills a secret need or desire. My first…
“The garden just grew,” Bruce Aune said with a slight shrug as we sat in his living room and looked out across a still green lawn to a neat curving border. All the perennials had been cut back, but shrubs, evergreen and deciduous, and small trees remained, providing the bones and structure of this garden. While it is true that the garden had changed over time as Bruce and his wife Anne moved into retirement, it had not…
Sometimes I think you have to be a mature person to fully appreciate evergreens. In youth, when we are changing and changing again, it is flowers and trees that are always changing in their own seasons that catch our attention, but evergreens are more stable. Which is not to say that their growth, even from season to season is static, but that the changes are more subtle. This fall, when the deciduous trees were bare, I…
Much has been written about the “Columbian Exchange,” which refers to the plants and animals (and diseases) that were exchanged between the Old World and the New once Columbus started ships regularly traveling across the Atlantic. The Old World owes a lot to the New, especially in an agricultural sense. Potatoes, corn, tomatoes, cocoa, pineapples and pumpkins and a dozen other crops traveled from the New World to the Old so successfully that everyone’s diet changed radically. However,…
All those who think roses are finicky plants that require fussing and lots of chemical sprays for disease and bugs will be surprised when they visit the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in the Bronx with its more than 3000 healthy roses. I visited the garden last week and spent an afternoon with the Curator, Peter Kukielski, the man who has supervised the renovation of the garden over the past…
During the spring and summer most of look at the trees surrounding us and see a generally undifferentiated green. The tree foliage grows full and heavy; for the most part we don’t see the individual hues, or shapes. That changes in the autumn. During the past few weeks I have been particularly aware of the changes in the trees, partly because of the color changes each hour with the fluctuation of sunlight and shadow. Then, each…
Things go bump in the night at this time of the year, but in her new book, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities (Algonquin Books $18.95), Amy Stewart takes us on a tour of the more bloodcurdling aspects of botany. We all know that Abraham Lincoln grew up motherless from the age of nine, but I certainly never knew that it was white snakeroot (Eupatoreum rugosum) that killed his mother in1818.…
While at the Shelburne Farm and Garden shop the other day, a woman stopped me to ask if it was too late to plant tulips. Absolutely not! I had gone into the shop myself to pick up a package of Angelique tulip bulbs, a beautiful pink double tulip that is one of the most popular bulbs sold. Fall is bulb planting season and it will last pretty much until the ground is frozen. However, it…
“The Creator may be seen in all the works of his hands; but in few more directly than in the wise economy of the Honey-Bee.” Lorenzo L. Langstroth 1853 Lorenzo L. Langstroth was Pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Greenfield between 1843 and 1848. His memorial on Bank Row, placed in 1948, includes an image of the hive with moveable frames that he invented. For the first time beekeepers, who had been gathering honey since…