There’s nothing quite as pallid and depressing-looking as a Thanksgiving dinner store-bought pumpkin pie. And it tastes about as good as it looks. With its machine-stamped crust and thick, gummy filling it usually sits untouched on the sideboard among the crumbs of other desserts, the November equivalent of December’s fruit cake. A first-rate pumpkin pie has a crisp, buttery crust, and is filled...
Certain places have a way of staying with us, imprinting their unique shapes and spirits on our memories forever. The gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. are one of those places for me. The grounds at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts are another. These two edenic settings have given me hours of pleasure during my visits and, after studying how they were conceived...
I was surprised to learn that Laugharne, Wales is happily celebrating Dylan Thomas’s centenary this month. A small fishing village on Carmarthen Bay, Laugharne is just down the coast from the town of Carmarthen where I spent a semester abroad studying with the poet and Welsh language advocate Raymond Garlick. Though this was about twenty years after Thomas’s death in 1953, most of the locals I...
O suns and skies and clouds of June, And flowers of June together, Ye cannot rival for one hour October’s bright blue weather… It’s the kind of brisk, newly pressed autumn day my mother would have chosen to recite the above lines. They’re from one of a dozen or so poems she knew by heart, along with Longfellow’s ‘The Children’s Hour’ and ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ — verses that she had learned...
Every neighborhood in Paris has its own open-air “marché volant” which literally means “flying market” because it seems to pop up magically a couple of times a week around 8:00 in the morning and then disappear again without a trace a little past noon. It is here under canvas tarps and among wooden stalls that you’ll discover the choicest fruits and vegetables, the freshest fish, poultry, and...
The poet Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006) summered in Provincetown for nearly 50 years where, over the decades, he built an extensive and apparently magnificent garden. His first collection of poems was published in 1930 and he continued to write through his very long and productive life. He was a beloved teacher and, as a judge of the Yale Younger Writers series, influenced the careers of many...
I thought they’d all left for the season, but as I was cutting some basil in the vegetable garden at sunset I heard the unmistakable sound of a hummingbird — a soft but insistent vroom! noise not unlike that of a toddler playing with a toy car. I turned around, hoping to find it — in the zinnias? among the nasturiums? — but it was already gone. It was almost as if it had come to say goodbye.
In 1908, a 400-foot, five-arch concrete trolley bridge was built to span the Deerfield River between the Massachusetts’ towns of Shelburne Falls and Buckland. Abandoned in 1928 as it became more economical to haul goods by truck, the span was transformed a year later by the Shelburne Falls Woman’s Club into “The Bridge of Flowers.”
One of the largest and most beautiful water ways in the Berkshires, the Stockbridge Bowl was originally known as Lake Makeenac which means “home of the Mahekanus,” a tribe of Mohicans whose council fires once burned along its shores. Though the lake is now rimmed with over 450 cottages, Kripalu (the world famous yoga and wellness center), and Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony...
There comes a moment every summer when I realize that it’s time to let the garden go. Though the phlox is finally coming into its own, and the Japanese anemone and turtleheads have yet to fully flower, I have to face the fact that there’s nothing more I can do to change the course of this particular growing season. The dahlias are never going to reach the height I’d planned on, so their brilliant...
I prefer growing cherry tomatoes, as opposed to the larger varieties, because they tend to ripen faster and demand a lot less nurturing and support. Surround them with aluminum cages. Throw on a little fertilizer. Pinch back the suckers. And they’re generally good to go. My eight plants this season— four sweet 100s, three sungolds, and a black cherry — all got off to a great start. They shot up...
I thought of Deborah Digges this week and her hauntingly beautiful poem ‘Telling the Bees.’ I’ve loved this poem for many years without — as is often the case with poetry — really understanding what it is about. At first read, it seems that the father of a middle daughter has died and that for some reason it’s her job to let the bees know about his passing. But the circumstances mattered far less...
Last weekend we drove over to Monterey, Mass. where, years ago, we had spent many happy summers. The old brown-shingled Cape we rented there was a mile or so down the road from Rawson Brook Farm which makes and sells Monterey Chèvre cheese. We used to walk from our place to the farm at least once a week along one of the prettiest stretches in the Berkshires. Nothing much has changed. New...
Some time ago I noticed that my fennel bush was crawling with caterpillars. They had distinctive green, yellow, and black stripes in a dot and dash formation somewhat like Morse code. Despite the fact that they were devouring my fennel fronds with glutonous ferocity, I found them quite pretty. When I took one down to Ward’s Nursery in Great Barrington and mentioned that I’d found it on the...