While spending a little time checking my favorite blogs, I saw that Mr. McGregor's Daughter was having fun with David Perry's color challenge. MMD took Red, Green and Blue photos, but I stuck with red. I'm a sucker for red - all shades. It was fun to look around the house and see what I could use. I took this photo through the bottom of a beautiful red handblown glass bowl held up against today's brilliant sunlight.
Yesterday Elizabeth Licata at Garden Rant wrote about Tovah Martin's new book, The New Terrarium. I haven't ever made a terrarium but at least three and possibly four years ago a dear friend gave me a berry bowl for Christmas. Elizabeth's post reminded me that I hadn't seen it for a while. I went to look. The berry bowl, planted with moss and partridgeberry (?) has always lived in our Great Room. It is usually not heated in…
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.…
While reading and enjoying my morning coffee I looked up to see this flame reflected in the framed map on the wall opposite me. And opposite the south windows where I have hung chandelier crystals to catch the sun sending rainbows dancing across the room, for a little while every day. As we come closer to the Solstice we are all more aware of the sun, and the diminishing hours of light and warmth. But there was the…
“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…
I have written about SASTRUGI before. This word from the Russian refers to the snow waves that many of us notice after a snowfall, but sastrugi can take many other forms than the gentle ripples in the snow caused by the wind. We have had a least a few snow showers every day for the past week, and enough wind to blow the light dry snow across our field and into the Sunken Garden, created when the old…
January is the month when I welcome silence. December is gone with all its noise. Gone are the jingle bells, carols in the stores, party music, laughter, and loud conversations in crowded rooms. Gone are the midnight shrieks and horns on New Year's Eve. Gone are the snaps and snarls of overtired, over-scheduled, short-tempered spouses and children. Here in the country January is silent. Silence is almost an impossibility in the city. One summer…
January is the month when I welcome silence.December is gone with all its noise. Gone are the jingle bells, carols in the stores, party music, laughter, and loud conversations in crowded rooms. Gone are the midnight shrieks and horns on New Year's Eve. Gone are the snaps and snarls of overtired, over-scheduled, short-tempered spouses and children.Here in the country January is silent.Silence is almost an impossibility in the city. One summer when we lived in New York there…
Heath is famous for its winds. The Montreal Express comes racing down our hill creating wind ripples that are properly known as sastrugi. I learned this word last year when my husband gave me Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape edited by Barry Lopez for Christmas. "A snowfield covered with sastrugi can look like the top of a lemon meringue pie, or like a desert sandscape, sculpted by wind into curvaceous dunes. The word comes from the…
Winter is officially here. Last week my daughter said she was tired of winter, and it hadn't even started yet. Krishna is knee deep in snow, but he prefers it to the ice that left many people in our town without power or phones for eight days.We had substantial snow Friday but yesterday it just flurried. Early this morning it began again and is falling, falling falling.