"Most people, early in November, take last looks at their gardens, and are then prepared to ignore them until the spring. I am quite sure that a garden doesn't like to be ignored like this. It doesn't like to be covered in dust sheets, as though it were an old room which you had shut up during the winter. Especially since a garden knows how gay and delightful it can be, even in the very frozen…
When I visited Marie Stella at her house, Beaver Lodge, she took me out onto the deck overlooking the woods and beaver pond. She said The Birch Woman was a sculpture done by Sally Fine. I looked, but did not see. Although the birches were beginning to lose their leaves, my eyes had to adjust to the shifting light and shadows as the leaves danced in the autumn breeze, until suddenly the Birch Woman materialized. The Birch Woman…
“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…
Last week some friends and I declared a Girls Day Out and set off to the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boyleston, MA. There is so much to see and enjoy and learn at Tower Hill. I always come away inspired. Some people manage to arrange several plants in a single pot for a beautiful arrangement. But it might be just as easy to get that beautiful arrangement by massing several pots with different plants together. A lesson…
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…
Pulling Together was the theme of this year's Annual Heath Fair organized by the Heath Agricultural Society and supported one way or another by just about every one of the town's 800 residents so that thousands of area people can enjoy a day in the country and gain a sense of the abundance around us - even in these hard times. It would not be pushing a metaphor too hard to say that it takes a lot of people …
We first met Dan our first spring in Heath in 1980. He stopped by the house to say he had come to get some farm implement that the previous owner said he could leave in the barn. The ensuing chat revealed that he and other friends had lived in our house for a time. Although we could not know it then, this was really a sign that our lives were already joined through the house, and would become even…
Yesterday famed author and illustrator Ed Young made a presentation at the Childrens Literature Festival for the young set at Buckland Shelburne Elementary School. He did everything the children asked, making a lion - and a chicken - according to their directions while he stood behind the easel and making a horse paper cut. He also had the children hold a long long scroll with a poem he had written some 20 years ago to demonstrate Chinese characters. In China,…
“Grow Food Everywhere!” is Ricky Baruc’s enthusiastic motto. It doesn’t matter if the soil is bad, or if you have a bad back. At Seeds of Solidarity Farm in Orange Baruc and his wife Deb Habib have proved that food can be grown anywhere, by anyone. He said his secret is cardboard and worms. I will add he gets some aid from the beautiful Diemand Farm compost. His technique is simple. He clears the garden spot then lays…
Lilian Jackman, owner, grower and general factotum of Wilder Hill Gardens, invited me over to see the late summer garden. I found her at her shady potting bench, situated so that she could keep working in the heat of the day. I admired the thought that went into the design and siting of the potting bench, but did not feel up to the concept of working all morning, having a little lunch and digesting time and then setting…