Ev Hatch, now retired from farming, is a member of the Hunger Task Force and a member of the First Congregational Church of Greenfield. When the First Church began planning a special day of service they called ‘Feet, Hands and Voices to Faith’ he knew just what to do. He donated a half acre of his farmland, and his services to prepare the field. On May 16th he and a crew, that included Luella McLaughlin (aged 93), set…
Someone is dining out in the garden. Not slugs. The lettuce has been pulled out of the ground and eaten. Some has been eaten down to the ground. This row was attacked differently, but still, the lettuce is gone. I've never had bunny damage before, but this looks like what I imagine bunnies would do. Who has experience to share? On that assumption I took out the sample bottle of Deer and Rabbit Deterrent that Liquid Fence sent…
How has your garden changed in 30 years? How has your life changed in 30 years? As a person who moved every two or three years (on average) for the first four sevenths of my life, I was stunned to realize that Henry and I have been in Heath for 30 years! And that means, that on May 22, today, I celebrate my 30th anniversary as garden columnist for The Recorder. It was a happy day for me…
I got a call from Edwin Graves who said I had to come and see the wisteria on his rental property in Greenfield. He told me it had climbed into two cherry trees, but he didn't tell me those two trees were 60 feet tall, and that the wisteria climbed into the very top reaches. The Graves bought this Greenfield house for her parents back in about 1981. Since they moved out in 1989 the house has been…
As the gardens green up and come into bloom special events are also popping up everywhere. Tower Hill Botanic Garden will have its Free Spring Open House on Sunday, April 11 from 10 to 5 pm. For the first time visitors will enter through the new Reception Gateway. Right now the famed field of 25,000 daffodils is in bloom. Read about my trip to Tower Hill last summer here. Next weekend IKEBANA--the Japanese art of floral design--will be…
Amy Stewart over at Garden Rant posted about the reality of Meryl's Streep's garden in the new movie, It's Complicated. As the LA Times article said, this garden was not planted or tended in situ. It is a movie set. The plants for this 'potager' were grown in a greenhouse and laid out when it was time for the scene to be shot. Tomatoes were wired to the plants. Some people have complained that this fantasy of a…
“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…
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…
The city is left behind. I'm home and the first trip out to visit friends we see a porcupine in front of the house eating an apple falled from our old apple tree. We had a delicious lunch of homemade tomato juice (with a few additions) carrot and parsnip soup, little chicken salad sandwiches and tiny fruit tarts. One of the best things about having a wonderful lunch at this house is having a tour of the vegetable…