I was given several canna lily rhizomes by a neighbor a few years back. They were long and knobby, pale as parsnips, caked with dirt and dangling hairy roots. “They’re beautiful when they start to grow,” my neighbor assured me. “And they get really tall, though mine have yet to flower.” Great, I thought. Plants that don’t flower. Just what every garden needs. I waited until the overnight...
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars… These are Buck’s thoughts as he leads a pack of fellow sled dogs on a night chase to track and kill a snowshoe rabbit. ...
And I think of roses, roses, White and Red, in the wide six-hundred-foot greenhouses, And my father standing astride the cement benches, Lifting me high over the four-foot stems, the Mrs. Russells, and his own elaborate hybrids, And how those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, Only a child, out of myself. What need for heaven, then, With that man, and those roses...
The wind was high on Florida’s Captiva Island this morning, whipping up whitecaps on the usually placid Gulf of Mexico and forcing the row of staid palms along the beach to bend southward in rigorous, calisthenic formation. But less than a mile down the island, a winding road led us back into a wide expanse of mangrove estuaries. They lay still and almost silent under the noonday sun. This...
We like March — his shoes are Purple. He is new and high — Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler — Makes he Forests Dry — Knows the Adders Tongue his coming And begets her spot — Stands the Sun so close and mighty — That our Minds are hot. News is he of all the others — Bold it were to die With the Blue Birds buccaneering On his British Sky — Emily Dickinson (version of 1878) Though the...
It’s been the cruelest of winters in southern New England. The birds have been swarming the feeders and suet cages, and the squirrels, driven to suicidal measures to crack what had been our fool-proof Yankee bird feeder, took to digging their back claws into the porch screens, launching their bodies forth like trapeze artists, and hungrily scrabbling in a mouthful or two of seed before gravity...
The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, And what will poor robin do then, poor thing? He’ll sit in a barn and keep himself warm and hide his head under his wing, poor thing. It’s snowing in the Berkshires this afternoon. And the temperature has been falling through the twenties. Yet again. Like most people who choose to live in a part of the country that enjoys four seasons...
One dull, chilly morning a few weeks ago, I looked up from my laptop to see a flutter of blue and red in the living room window of our house in the Berkshires. An American bluebird was snacking on the winterberry branches that I’d tucked among the pine cones and evergreen boughs in the window box. It’s hard to describe the joy I felt at the sight of that bird! But it was pure and unexpected —...
French gardens are a lot like French women: chic and elegant and pulled together in a way that makes the average American gardener want to just throw in the spade. I’ve made something of a study of the French garden over the years — from the glorious and enormous public jardins to the perfect little vegetable patches or potagers that seem to be tucked behind every cottage in the countryside —...
Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a small, close-knit community, but something in me periodically needs to break free, sail away, explore the wider world. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel” she writes: “What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/ in our bodies, we are determined to rush/to see the sun the other way around?/The...
I think there must be a gardening gene, yet to be discovered in some secret strand of our DNA. My paternal grandmother created one of the most beautiful and extensive rose gardens I’ve ever seen (and I’m a devoted rosarian) in the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up. In the midst of the Depression, newly widowed and with six children to raise, she began what was to become a horticultural...
For me, few things are more satisfying than digging into the earth, uprooting weeds, pruning back shrubs, and planting bulbs. It’s also a beautiful way to commemorate someone you love. We have neighbors in the Berkshires who plant a fruit tree each time a new grandchild is born. (They have a whole orchard now!) When my mother died a few years ago, a bleeding heart was flowering outside her...
Though the observation is hardly original, I’ve come to understand firsthand that, at its heart, gardening is the urge to add order and context to the landscape, to somehow harness and humanize the wild. In that sense, Mother Nature herself is the wisest and most patient of teachers. Now remember, dear, you can almost hear her say as you take in the sad little heap of shriveled stems and...
Because gardening is such a solitary practice and in many ways repetitive, it can easily serve as a form of meditation. When you’re going through a difficult time — or have a serious problem to work through — there’s nothing like pulling up weeds or pruning back a wayward shrub to help focus the mind. There’s also a primordial aspect to it — the sense of being the latest in countless centuries...