Spring is arriving in the Berkshires in fits and starts. It’s a slightly disorienting, in-between time. The sun is higher and stronger, but the trees are just beginning to leaf out, and the harsh bright light can be blinding. It’s cold enough some nights to have a fire, but it’s often still daylight when we sit down to dinner. Except for the bright chrome yellow splashes of...
I woke up in the middle of the night and heard the wild geese overhead. Their cries seemed to go on and on. This is the time of year when hundreds of thousands of birds are migrating across the skies under the cover of darkness. The Berkshire fields may still be a sodden uniform beige, but everywhere around us life is stirring. The witch hazel has been in gaudy bloom for almost a month now...
It snowed last night. It’s snowing now. It will snow through the afternoon. There’s been a rhythm and repetitiveness to this winter’s weather that’s a bit like a Latin conjugation: amo, amas, amat. Though there’s been very little to love about these past weeks of dead batteries and leaking roofs. Despite Valentine’s Day, there’s no sweet-talking...
I sensed her — a blur in the woods, a fresh set of tracks in the snow — before I saw her. At times, when the feeders were usually aflutter with activity, the birds would suddenly vanish. I had the unsettling sensation of being watched. And then one morning, hunger or familiarity emboldening her, she trotted out of the woods: a red fox with black socks and the triangular facial features that...
This is the time of year when the contours of the Berkshire hills once again dominate the view. Gentle and curvaceous, they recline against the winter landscape, silent as the snow that often covers their flanks. Melville imagined Mount Greylock which filled his vista to the north as a white whale breaching the surface: Moby-Dick in all his ferocious beauty. Harvey Mountain, which looms above us...
The heavier snow was supposed to fall north of us. We were to get just a light dusting. The long mild November had managed to keep the idea of winter at bay. Only a week or so ago the oaks and beeches were still golden, and moths fluttered against the windows at night. It seemed almost possible to believe that the unseasonal warmth might last forever. But then the snow began to fall, and this...
It’s been a muted fall in the Berkshires. The spring plague of gypsy moths followed by endless weeks of rain (July was the wettest on record) did a number on the leaves. Some just seemed to drop en masse overnight as if too exhausted to hold on another second. The hot crimson reds and burnt sienna oranges that usually light up our hills each October are missing for the most part from the autumnal
This is the time of year when clusters of small daisy-like blooms dot the landscape. Some are tiny and ghostly white, more froth than flower; others the size of half dollars with bright periwinkle petals and chrome yellow eyes. The Berkshires alone boasts more than 20 species of wild asters (Latin for “star”) and there are several hundred known varieties around the country. Like Japanese Anemone...
Its pink, furry florets shoot up along roadsides and in fallow fields, the tallest kids in the class. Though a little ungainly, Joe Pye weed is reliably sturdy just when other showier plants are starting to wither and fade. For centuries, it’s been used by herbalists to reduce fever. Legend has it that an Indian named Joe Pye shared it with the settlers in
I’ve always loved them. Long, broad, and flat, Romano beans look like professionally ironed versions of their string bean cousins. They were called “Italian beans” when I was growing up, only available frozen and always on a hit and miss basis. They’re still hard to find fresh, except for a few weeks in late July and early August when they briefly put in an
When I’m hot and tired after working in the garden, I’ll walk up into the woods to commune with the ferns and moss that carpet the forest floor. Cool and fresh-looking on even the most oppressive days, they exude a zen-like calm. Perhaps that’s because they’ve survived on earth for so long, with some estimates putting them at nearly 300 million
Intricate as origami, among the first plants in the garden to flower every spring, bleeding hearts are as cheery and old-fashioned as hand-made valentines. They seem to appear, fully formed, overnight. Their sprays of blossoms — each a heart-shaped pouch dangling a tiny white fan — float like Japanese lanterns above luminous fern-like foliage. Cultivated bleeding hearts, members of the poppy
It’s been on its way out for years, scattering branches and bark the way an elderly woman might start shedding her possessions. A decade ago, the tree was sheared nearly in half when a high wind rampaged through the Berkshires, leaving a tangled mass of shattered branches and willow wands on the front lawn. What remained, looked lopsided and off-balance, an amputee with a phantom limb. We...
We’re still seesawing between seasons in the Berkshires, the temperatures sometimes swinging 40 degrees in a single day. But there’s a red haze in the underbrush and a thickening in the upper branches of the trees. The brook roars day and night, its banks overrun with snowmelt and spring thaws. The fields remain brown and beaten down by winter, stalks sticking up out of the ground like the spokes...