By the time I learned about National Farmer's Market Week it was too late to celebrate with the rest of the nation, but it reminded me of the changes in the ways farmers now market their crops, and affect the economy of our communities. Agriculture has been important to our part of Massachusetts for decades. There were many dairy farms, but they were starting to close down when we moved to Heath in 1979. When we moved to…
Planting trees is always a significant project. A couple of weeks ago I went over to the Energy Park at 7 a.m. for what I thought was a celebratory tree planting. I was surprised that there was no crowd; however Nancy Hazard, Mary Chicoine and John Bottomley, all of the Greenfield Tree Committee, were hard at work planting two tulip poplars and a disease resistant elm. It did not take a crowd to make this a celebratory occasion.…
On this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day the big event is water and more water. Just to give you the full force you can see how deep the water is right in front of the garden shed at the back of the garden. This is the worst spot, and it is the beginning of the lake the garden has become. One of my hose guard wine bottles in ready to float away. Meadow rue has such tiny delicate flowers…
Gardeners plant flower gardens in their backyards, but Mother Nature loves to plant flower gardens along the highways and by-ways. I am often surprised by how many flowers thrive in sandy soil and survive the salting of roads in winter. I drive around town and I see familiar flowers in Mother Nature’s gardens like orange daylilies, blue chicory and Queen Anne ’s lace. While I enjoy roadside gardens, it was Lady Bird Johnson who took the appeal and…
The torrential rainfall began late in the day. It was not constant, but when we woke up this morning the rain gauge very clearly said another 2 and 3/4 inches of rain had fallen. There has never been a summer quite like this with temperatures in the 90s and many heavy rainfalls. This photo shows the ankle deep water in the widest path to the back of the garden and the shed. The very large shrub in the…
This ensemble of Strings for Kids played for shoppers at the Farmer's Market a couple of weeks ago. They are serious and talented musicians. Strings For Kids is a free music program run by Artspace in collaboration with Greenfield Public Schools. Students who enroll in Strings For Kids are offered a choice of learning to play violin or cello, and receive the following benefits at no charge: Instrument loan for the duration of enrollment Weekly in-school group instruction led…
As long ago as 1945 I had an opinion about hydrangeas. In 1945 I was five years old and living with my parents, and my two younger brothers, in the Bronx. When the weekend weather was fine my parents often took all of us on a stroll through the neighborhood. We lived in an apartment building surrounded by cement, but there were many houses on our street that had tiny front yards that often showed off one or…
Using shrubs is one way to take up room in a garden, but it is also possible to have tall perennials serve the same function. I have several tall perennials in my garden that I realize are not well placed, partly because they are overcrowding each other. I will be reorganizing them in the fall. In the meantime I want to suggest some tall, dare I say statuesque, perennials that can make quite a statement in a flower…
I was very happy to learn that Stone Meadow Gardens is a daylily farm near me, less than half an hour away in Ashfield. After checking out their online catalog I zipped right up there this past Sunday. I knew that I would find more than the three daylilies I needed from among the 500 varieties Phil Pless and Linda Taylor have growing. Stone Meadow Gardens is open on Friday through Sunday until August 5. However, you can…
Daylilies seem like a quintessential American flower, its orange blossoms blazing as they do along the edges of summer byways. And yet daylilies have an ancient history beginning in China about 5000 year ago. Chi Pai wrote a materia medica for Emperor Huang Ti dating back to 2697 B.C. when the flowers were more used medically than for ornament. By 1500 C.E. the daylily had travelled to Europe. In 1793 Linneaus, who introduced the binomial system of nomenclature,…