but I didn't attend. The Greenfield Garden Club always has a delightful Christmas party complete with a delicious pot luck and a Yankee Swap which is always great fun. Last night I set out, clutching the party address on Bernardston Road. It was foggy when I set out, but I gave it never a thought. As I drove along I noticed that even the houses near the road were camouflaged by the fog. I drove past where I…
This post is a little off the subject, but as a member of the Bridge of Flowers committee I can't help blowing the Bridge's horn. The famed magazine Architectural Digest has opened their on-line article about elevated gardens around the world with our beautiful Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls. They even noted that our Bridge is probably the first renovated Bridge in the United States. Our Bridge of Flowers now attracts thousands of visitors every year…
This year Cool Springs Press is helping me celebrate my eight years of blogging with a Giveaway of Terrariums: Gardens Under Glass. These have been rich years for me be cause my blog has brought so many wonderful gardeners into my life, and so many beautiful gardening experiences. With other garden bloggers I travelled to Buffalo and to Seattle and saw beautiful gardens, large and small and all different. This past summer I attended a Garden Writers Conference…
Our Thanksgiving table will include root vegetables like Yukon Gold potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, beets, parsnips and carrots. Even the Pilgrims might have had some of these vegetables at the first Thanksgiving. Root vegetables were an important part of the food supply in Europe before canning and freezing were available. Root vegetables were harvested in the fall and stored for winter use without preserving them in some way, like pickling or drying. When I was a child living…
Fall is a season of thanksgiving. One of the blessings of the season is a good harvest and this year there has been a spectacular apple harvest – indeed a spectacular fruit harvest of almost every kind. I gave thanks and celebrated with Amy Traverso, author of the The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, during the Cider Days apple tasting at Clarkdale Fruit Farm. I joined the crowd at Traverso’s table tasting her pretty Quick Bread and Butter Apple Pickles…
As far as I am concerned the leaves that fall in the fall tra-la are as welcome as the flowers that bloom in the spring. When I lived high on a windy hill in Heath all the leaves blew away. I helped a neighbor rake leaves, and took them away to my compost pile. I loved picking up a few bags of leaves that people left in front of their houses when I came into Greenfield to shop.…
On this Garden Blogger's Bloom Day in Greenfield, Mass, still boasting only a Zone 5 rating, my very late blooming pink chrysanthemums are still blooming. We have had frost, and some rain and wind, but these dependable beauties are still going. They are the only thing blooming outside.We are still not having freezing night temperatures as a regular thing, though it does get down below 40 degrees. This prostrate rosemary was taken out of a pot and put…
One of the blessings of our new Greenfield house is the tall and majestic American sycamore which gives the front of the house shade and helps cool it in summer. My husband Henry and I have never had such a large domestic tree. New York’s residential trees cannot be too big, and the big trees in Heath were nowhere near the house. They were wild trees in the woods. We were told that the tree was a…
The time has come to say farewell to the End of the Road. You will notice I am not saying farewell to Heath, because our presence in Heath will not end. When it was clear that it was time to make a move and be closer to our children we realized we did not want to move away from old friends. We expect to make new friends in Greenfield, but we will keep our old friends in…
Winnie-the-Pooh and I did not become acquainted until I was an adult and read what had become literary classics, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, to my young children. I had known of the books, of course, but only through an Eeyore-ish high school friend who was devoted to all the characters who lived in the 100 Acre Wood. I did not understand his devotion at the time, but as I read these gentle stories of friendship…