‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells, And pretty maids all in a row.’ Illustrations of this familiar nursery rhyme tend to show proper young ladies in beribboned batiste holding colorful watering cans with clean hands, but while the students at the Heath Elementary School do all they can to make their garden grow, there is no sign of batiste. Real modern children favor denim…
“We live where there is so much possibility in the landscape,” Marie Stella said to me as we stood on the deck of Beaver Lodge, her house in Ashfield, looking through the woods down to the beaver pond. Stella has entered into most of those possibilities, using native plants, planting vegetables and fruits where a lawn might be expected, harvesting rainwater, using stone from the house site to…
The pace is slightly more relaxed, but the fall season can be just as busy for gardeners as the spring season. Many of the same tasks are required, clean up, soil building, compost building, and planting. In the autumn, all gardeners, both novice and experienced, have another chance to launch the next attempt to improve their gardens. For flower gardeners this means a comprehensive new guide to perennial care might be in order. With The Perennial…
My father never felt dinner was over until he had eaten his apple. The apple was a ritual. He loved cutting an apple in half around the equator to show us, or any available children, the star hidden in the center of the apple. And he proved the adage that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. He rarely needed the services of a doctor until his short final illness. With news coverage of the H1N1…
John and Mary Ellen Warchol cannot take a visitor on a tour of their display garden without urging smells and tastes. “Lemon basil makes a fabulous pesto. Taste,” John says. “Taste this. The smaller leaves are very flavorful,” Mary Ellen says. “Mmmmm. Thai basil really is different. Spicy,” I agree. I did not taste all 40 of the types of basil the Warchols grow but I gained a new appreciation for the variety of flavors that…
Pulling Together was the theme for this year’s Heath Fair. After such a cool, wet summer when it was hard to get a good hay crop in and Late Blight hit local farmers, as well as local gardeners who mourned over lost tomato and potato crops, it felt like we were all doing some heavy hauling. It takes a lot of people pulling together to prepare the for the Fair, from the vision and energy…
Snoopy asked the question, “Is there any reason why mealtime should not be a joyous occasion?” In our family we have always welcomed the chance for joy three times a day, but in recently mealtime has been an anxious time for many people across the country. There have been a number of local responses to the plight of families who have been affected by the economic downturn. The Belly Bus showed up on the Greenfield Common last week…
Nearly 30 years ago when Thom Chiofalo first saw this plot of land in Rowe it was nothing but woods and an impossible slope. Now the approach is a green wall of hemlock set on a mossy carpet. When the sunburst gate flies open it reveals a vista of water and a grove of trees. A few more steps and I was enthralled by the vastness of the sky and the welcoming walks that lead down the broad…
My wisteria has gone wild. Tendrils are twisting everywhere. New shoots are coming up everywhere. The wisteria’s genetic vitality has never been so vigorous. I am blaming it all on the cool and rainy summer. My history with this wisteria is long and varied. During our first year in China we saw many beautiful wisterias with their graceful pendant flowers blooming everywhere from the long gorgeous pergola in Purple Bamboo Park, to humble trellises in dusty…
Last weekend my cousin Jay married the beautiful Juliet in a white garden designed by Robin Kramer, the owner of the house where the wedding took place. A summer wedding could ask no more beautiful setting than a white garden such as this. White gardens seem to have a place all their own in garden literature. I suppose one reason is that there are so many flowers, shrubs, vines and trees that bloom in shades of white…