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…

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.…

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.