Bloom Day is here, but there are no blooms outdoors. But for the first time in a couple of years I have blooms in January. The amaryllis that is opening was an early Christmas present and it grew rapidly. The amaryllis with buds about to open spent the summer out in my garden and is giving me great gratification Two other amaryllis bulbs that spent the summer in the ground are coming along - slowly. I have hopes.…
My frigid winter garden is peaceful, blanketed with snow. Mysterious tracks speak of the creatures that wander across the landscape, leaving hints of their dancing in the bright moonlight, or shifting shadows of the breezy day. Tiny birds frolic near the Norway spruce, and seem to be feasting on the spruce seeds left for them on the snow. My town winter garden is small, and very different from the fields of Heath, where the snow danced with the…
New cultivars and old favorites plants are a part of every garden. When I was a Girl Scout we sang a song with the line “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver but the other gold.” As I look out at my garden and look at the dawning of a new year, I am thinking about the new things I may plant and use in the garden, but I know there are certain things that…
December celebrations for all. Today is December 23. The Hanukkah celebration has concluded, Christmas is two days away, and Kwanzaa is three days away. December is a month of celebrations with traditions that lead us through the days. As I prepared for our own family Christmas I suddenly realized that the celebration of each of these holidays involves plants, plants which are essential in one way or another. Hanukkah is a moveable feast because, like Christian Easter, it…
December is a season for new Books, great for gift giving. Shawna Coronado has shared her gardening expertise in many ways on TV, on lecture tours and in her books like Grow a Garden Wall: Create Vertical Gardens with a Purpose, but in her new book The Wellness Garden she shares her own history with painful osteoarthritis and how she learned to change her lifestyle for better health. The Wellness Garden: Grow, Eat and Walk Your Way to…
Here in New England we can take trees for granted. Trees line our streets, our roads, and our highways. We do not have to work hard to find a woodland that invites us to stroll and enjoy a period of cool tranquility. The Japanese even have a word, Shinrin-yoku, or ‘forest bathing,’ for the practice of taking a walk in the woods for the health benefits it brings. And yet, many of us are not familiar with the…
We officially moved into our Greenfield house on October 24, 2015, just in time to stock up on bags of candy for the 100+ children - mostly very young children - who showed up in princess and ninja attire on Halloween. The celebrations had begun. No longer could we go out into the field to cut our own tree, but we were happy to shop at the open air market on Main Street and buy a beauty. This…
Houseplants: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Growing and Caring for Indoor Plants by Lisa Eldred Steinkopf (Cool Springs Press $30) has a cool green and white cover
Today I celebrate another blogaversary. Ten years ago I inaugurated my commonweeder blog. As a reader and a gardener I enjoyed the little play on words as the commonWEEDER and opposed to Virginia Woolf's CommonREADER books of essays. I had the most basic of ideas about what a blog was, but a good friend who knows more about such things said I needed a blog. I acknowledged in my first post that I did not know what was…
The Secret Gardeners – Britain’s Creatives Reveal Their Private Sanctuaries by Victoria Summerley with photographs by Hugo Rittson Thomas (Francis Lincoln $45) is a glamorous armchair tour of beautiful gardens created such creative people as Sir Richard Branson, Julian Fellowes, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rupert Everett, Sting and 20 other familiar and not so familiar British stars. Most of us don’t think we are engaged in garden design when we go out to plant a perennial bed or plant…