We drove up to see the enlarged and renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown recently. It had just reopened after ten years of planning and construction, and we were eager to explore the new Clark Center designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. We were just as excited by the prospect of visiting the many wonderful works in the permanent Clark collection — paintings which had become old...
One of my most prized possessions is a map that the poet John Ashbery drew for me many years ago on the back of an old business card. This was at the end of a long celebratory dinner — the purpose of which I’ve now forgotten — and a great deal of wine had been consumed. Though almost illegible, the map provides directions to Rodgers Book Barn in the Columbia County town of Hillsdale. “It’s...
There’s nothing like a daylily to remind us that life is both fleeting and beautiful. The flowers of the Hemerocallis — which literally means “day” and “beautiful” in Greek — last only 24 hours. The bright orange flutes of yesterday are withered like spent party balloons today, often drooping from the same flower stalk as the new day’s fresh-faced offering. The center of the flower is called its...
I was raised in the unenlightened days when lettuce came in one variety: iceberg (and this was well before its recent haute cuisine revival). So my first taste of arugula was something of a culinary awakening. It was the summer of 1980, and my future husband and I had been invited to lunch at the home of friends of his in the Berkshires. I have no memory of what else was served, but between the...
This is the time of year when Queen Anne’s Lace flowers in drifts of white across the open fields and along the roadsides of the Berkshires. An immigrant from Europe, this biennial was supposedly named for Queen Anne of Great Britain. The pinpoint of purply red at the center of each white flower is said to represent the droplet of blood left by Queen Anne when she pricked herself making lace...
I thought I’d made my peace with them. It hadn’t been easy. Six years ago, a woodchuck family set up a compound on our property. They burrowed tunnels in the mowing field, behind a rotting log near the compost heap, and (appropriately enough) under the woodpile beside my writing studio. From time to time while I was working, I’d be overcome with the eerie sensation that I was being watched. I’d...
A few years back on an early June night a storm raged through the Berkshires, downing trees and knocking out power. Our elderly weeping willow was sheared nearly in half. A massive tangle of shattered limbs and willow wands sat in a forlorn heap on our front lawn. What remained of the tree looked denuded and vulernable — an amputee still in shock. For years Mike, who cuts our lawn, had...
Sorrel’s at its best early in the season, leafing out in the Berkshires about the same time fiddleheads and morels are putting in their own brief appearances. Like them, it has a pungent flavor, redolent of the soil from which it has so recently sprung. To bite into a sorrel leaf is to understand the meaning of sour. In fact, the word “sorrel” probably originates from “surele” which is the Old...
Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies, Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows. I envy you, drunk with flowers; Butterflies swirling in your dreams. – ‘Visit to the Hermit Chui’ by Qian Qi (Tang Dynasty) I first fell in love with tree peonies at Naumkeag, the historic Stanford White “cottage” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts which is just down the road from us in the Berkshires. The more...
I think we all probably associate certain plants with particular events and people in our lives. The smell of pear blossoms or pine bows, hyacinths or lilacs, can sweep me into the past as magically as a madeleine once transported Proust. I was struck by this recently when I went back to my home town in Pennsylvania for the funeral service of a beloved aunt. She’d been brought up, along with my...
The growing season in the Berkshires is at least two weeks behind this year. It wasn’t until late April that I finally glimpsed one of the first signs of spring in our fenced-in vegetable garden: chive shoots — fine as cat whiskers — poking up through the snow-flattened mound of last year’s patch. This week I noticed that the chives had started to thicken, lengthen, and spread. Like...
The shoes put on each time left first, then right… —from ‘Habit’ by Jane Hirshfield I planted pansies (Viola x wittrockiana) a few days ago in our window box and in the old cement urn I inherited from my mother. Do I plant pansies this time of the year because I hope their bright, clownish faces might add a little color and humor to our all-too-slowly greening landscape? Or is it...
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. — Robert Frost Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, but moved as a boy to Lawrence, Massachusetts after his father died. Resettled in New England, Frost’s mother became a...
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light! — Edna St. Vincent Millay Our place in the Berkshires is just over the hill from Steepletop, the house where the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived from 1925 until her death there in 1950. This is where Millay slowly retreated from the world — into the...