To my eyes Greenfield becomes more beautiful every year. Many homes have less grass and more flower gardens that bring smiles to passers-by. There are flowering trees everywhere in the spring. Baystate Franklin Hospital, Greenfield Savings Bank and others have beautiful public plantings. One new public garden is specifically designed to support pollinators, the birds and the bees. This Meadow Garden was planted and is being maintained by volunteers in front of the John Zon Community Center on…

Gardenlust by Christopher Woods The first of the garden books I've been reading is Gardenlust: A Botanical Tour of the World’s Best New Gardens by Christopher Woods (Timber Press $40). Gardenlust is a beautiful book with stunning photographs of amazing gardens. Woods has very specifically chosen fifty gardens created in the past twenty years. There are gardens from North America, mostly the U.S., then on to the other Americas, Europe, Africa, India, Asia and Australia and New Zealand.…

In mid-July I received an email from Peter Guertin in Orange who told me about the mutant rudbeckias he had growing in his garden. He included several photos of those mutant rudbeckias. One looked like a smile in the middle of the flower. One looked like a fat caterpillar growing across the center of the blossom. One blossom had two black eyes, almost back to back creating two attached blossoms. They were very odd flowers indeed. I was…

The title of Christin Couture’s Nearest Faraway Place exhibit might sound confusing to many people. For Christin Couture that Place is about more than a shadowy woodland, and rushing river water. “The view is like a theater. A theater is always changing. This view I have is of the changing seasons and weather.  I never tire of this scene. The location is the anchor of all the paintings. Everything else is changeable,” she said. For nearly 15 years…

Years ago I tried visiting the Hawley bog, but gave up when the walkway gave out.  I had to wait to really see the bog until Sue Draxler offered to be my guide. Sue Draxler was my neighbor when we lived in Heath. She was a very special neighbor because she loved the natural world and generously shared her knowledge of the world around us. Her love of nature showed itself in many ways, in her art works,…

The rains started last August. The rains continued during our long cold spring. The effect on my garden was that a number of plants drowned including my beautiful double weeping cherry. The view from my kitchen window was now bleak and empty. To remedy the situation now and for the future we first needed to raise our already raised planting beds. Spring rains kept us from beginning this project.  To raise the height of the beds we needed…