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…
The Pleasant Street Community Garden provided garden plots for over 20 people until that whole site was razed a few years ago. Davis Street School, the surrounding paving and the gardens all disappeared. There was great mourning, but last year the John Zon Community Center was completed. Hedges and trees were planted, and a Meadow Garden was planted by volunteers, but there were no Community Gardens. One could imagine that the Community Garden was just sleeping, because there…
The Climate Change Rally in Greenfield brought many children, inspired by young Greta Thunmberg, to the Greenfield Common on Friday, September 20. The Children and the Adults were all protesting. Our climate is dangerously changing and there are protests this day all around the globe. Some Students went to Boston to participate in the Youth Climate Strike What can we all do? Vote! Learn about ways you can stop global warming. We can't leave it all up to…
Everybody is talking about hemp. When we recently attended a family gathering in Vermont we talked to three of my young cousins, Heidi, Tammy, and Debby who had planted hemp. A change in the Vermont laws now makes it legal to plant hemp. Four hundred and fifty or so farms are now doing just that. Dairy farming is not as profitable as it was, and hemp is now in demand. Please remember, industrial hemp does not contain THC,…
On this Garden Blogger's Bloom Day I went out into the garden in the mist to take my photos. These asters just started blooming on the 'hellstrip.' A few other plants are blooming like the coneflower and a pink phlox. The Firelight hydrangea (one of three hydrangeas) is getting pinker every day. Blooming flowers around her include a helenium, Grandpa Ott's morning glory, a delphinium and a pink honeysuckle. A lot is still going on in the garden.…