And the wind is blowing. I barely made it out to the hen house and back. This is a day for staying home, browsing through Right Rose Right Place by Peter Schneider and considering what roses I want to add to The Rose Walk in the spring. My daughter Kate in Texas suggested I build a wish list on the Antique Rose Emporium website. So I did. I hope someone looks. You all have a chance to win that…
The artist Robert Strong Woodward spent most of his life in Buckland - and in a wheelchair. At the age of 21 he was injured in a hunting accident in California where he was living. Paralyzed from the waist down he returned to New England where he was born, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then moved to Buckland. It was his intent to make his living as an artist. He was…
Because it is my second Blogoversary, both Storey Publishing and CowPots are making it possible to have two Give Aways. Right Rose, Right Place: 359 Perfect Choices by rose lover and expert Peter Schneider will be a lovely and useful holiday treat for any rose gardener, or would-be rose gardener. There is advice here for the experienced gardener as well as for the novice. I have already added a number of roses I never knew about to my…
The first wildness was our local porcupine sunning himself (I don't really know if he is a he or she) in front of the henhouse this morning. I nearly stepped on him on my way to feed the chickens because I was so busy looking at a wild hardy kiwi vine on the adjacent shed and wondered how I was ever going to prune and tame it. Fortunately the movement of the porcupine, including getting all his quills in fighting…
"Now, thank God, everything is finished; perhaps there are still things to be done; there at the back the soil is like lead, and I rather wanted to transplant this centaurea, but peace be with you; the snow has already fallen. . . . Well then make a fire in my room; let the garden sleep under its iderdown of snow. It is good to think of other things as well; the table is full of books which…
Much has been written about the “Columbian Exchange,” which refers to the plants and animals (and diseases) that were exchanged between the Old World and the New once Columbus started ships regularly traveling across the Atlantic. The Old World owes a lot to the New, especially in an agricultural sense. Potatoes, corn, tomatoes, cocoa, pineapples and pumpkins and a dozen other crops traveled from the New World to the Old so successfully that everyone’s diet changed radically. However,…
Now that Thanksgiving has been celebrated in riotous style (23 for dinner!) it is time to move on to the next celebration. On December 6, 2007 I asked myself the question, as posed by another blog, whether I was too old to blog. The only way to find out was to begin the commonweeder.com, and I guess the answer is no, because I am still standing. Or kneeling, bending, stretching, digging, weeding, in the garden and sitting at the computer.…
Things go bump in the night at this time of the year, but in her new book, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities (Algonquin Books $18.95), Amy Stewart takes us on a tour of the more bloodcurdling aspects of botany. We all know that Abraham Lincoln grew up motherless from the age of nine, but I certainly never knew that it was white snakeroot (Eupatoreum rugosum) that killed his mother in1818.…
"Most people, early in November, take last looks at their gardens, and are then prepared to ignore them until the spring. I am quite sure that a garden doesn't like to be ignored like this. It doesn't like to be covered in dust sheets, as though it were an old room which you had shut up during the winter. Especially since a garden knows how gay and delightful it can be, even in the very frozen…
Happy Halloween! One way to strike terror into this night of goblins and ghosts is to think of the fears that plants have generated over the centuries. Deadly nightshade was rightly understood to be a poison, but other members of the family, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers were less deadly and more delicious. The large pale flower of datura, another member of the family, is beautiful but equally deadly. Not all peas (Lathyrus sativus) are benign, or all members…