In the olden days we gardeners would take a deep breath and go out to clean up the fall garden. There were dead annuals, and dead perennials gone to seed. There were dead leaves everywhere. The garden is a mess in the fall. That view of the fall garden has changed. Last month I attended Lorri Cochran’s talk, courtesy of Greening Greenfield, about how to create a habitat garden that will support birds, and bees and during the…
On this Bloom Day I don't have any blooms, but I do have color. For the past week we have looked out at a hard frost. Beautiful in its own way. However we do have color. Somehow the yellow twig dogwood never photographs as accurately as my eyes when I look out my kitchen window and see the sun shining on what is a more chartreuse dogwood than its name suggests. It is because of its brilliant color…
Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater Had a wife but couldn’t keep her Put her in a pumpkin shell And there he kept her very well. Children have learned this little rhyme for generations. Hard to know what we all made of it when we were small, but the rhythms are fun and so is the image of a little housewife in her pumpkin shell. Boston can take some credit for this rhyme. It first appeared in 1825 in a…
Franklin County CiderDays will celebrate its 25th Anniversary with three days of cider tastings, apple recipes, apple history, holistic orchard management, and more as well as the crowning of Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruiting trees and orchards. The party will begin on Friday, November 1 and end on Sunday, November 3 at 5 p.m. It is important to order tickets for some of the special talks as they always sell out, but there are many free events.…
The view from the window is slightly skewed today so I (we) can see the full garden, fence to fence. The river birches have lost most of their leaves but neighboring oaks and maples, along with our chestnut tree have lots of leaves left to keep us raking. There is sufficient overlap you can even see the pails. It is so hard to be cleaning and storing equipment this time of the year. The golden shrub in the…
In 2013 I attended the opening of the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was a sunny September day and Museum Director Anne Hawley and landscape designer Michael Van Valkenburgh were on hand to explain how the garden came to be. It was certainly not the Monk’s Garden that I had seen a few years earlier. The day I saw that space I could not understand why it was called any kind of…
With new room on his acreage Barry began planting many other kinds of trees, creating his own arboretum, his own museum of trees.
Garden Blogger's Bloom Day on this beautiful autumnal day if full of flowers, but night time temperatures, 45 degrees at 6 am, remind us that autumn can be a very short season. The flower bed above was created after all the perennials, and my beautiful weeping cherry drowned in the rains and garden flooding last fall, and in the spring. These annuals were just a stopgap while I rethought the space, but I have loved looking at all…
How many late season flowers are there? We gardeners are always happy in the spring when our first snowdrops or daffodils open their blossoms. The year of bloom has begun! Many of us wonder how long we can keep the garden blooming through September and October. I have found there are many possibilities. Zinnias are an amazing annual blooming through the fall season. They come in many forms from singles, with just one row of petals, then semi-double…
What is a Seed Library? We all know what a library is. A place where we can find and take away non-fiction books about the world, fiction books about worlds we imagine and picture books to delight our eyes. But I never heard of a seed library and could not imagine where one would find such a thing. But recently I went to the Greenfield Community College Nahman-Watson Library, and there, right near an entry door, I saw…