Liza Gyllenhaal — a writer in the garden

My witch hazel shrub is flowering — the blooms flamboyant bursts of yellow and red, like miniature pom poms, cheering on springtime’s long-delayed kick-off. Besides an almost imperceptible blur of red in the underbrush and a shimmer of gold among the willow wands, it’s the only bright color in our otherwise stubbornly monotone landscape. Witch hazels are native to America and perfectly at home in our rocky and unwelcoming southern New England soil. I planted mine four years ago in a hard-to-fill spot at the back of the long border —with too much shade and in dicey proximity to a stand of mature trees — but it’s settled in nicely without complaint or obvious problems. Continue reading →

Here’s a guest posting that I hope adds a touch of levity to these last grey days of March:

Walking along the shore of Captiva Island the other day, who should I bump into but my old teacher Linnaeus Zandtdahler. In case the name escapes you, Zandtdahler happens to be the world’s leading shell taxonomist and a figure of such renown in his field that even though he has retired professionally marine museums still keep his number handy on their smart phones. When a shell previously unknown to the scientific community washes up on a beach in, say, Mexico or Australia or South Africa, you can bet that Doc Zandt will be called in to classify it and come up with a name.

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Anne Morrow Lindbergh — aviator, author, and wife of Charles Lindbergh — wrote Gift from the Sea sixty years ago on Florida’s Captiva Island. Nobody knows exactly which cottage she lived in when she wrote the eloquent meditation on and for women that would become an international bestseller, but I know it must have been near to where we’re staying now. Captiva is only a little over one square mile in size, an extended sand spit, lapped on one side by Pine Island Sound and caressed on the other by the gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico. Continue reading →

Preserved lemons, the key ingredient in many Moroccan and Indian dishes, are lemons that have been pickled in a salty brine with various other spices and fermented for several months before using. They have a uniquely tart and intensely lemony taste. I first came upon them when my sister, working then as personal trainer, took on the well-known New York caterer Serena Bass as a client. Serena would generously trade goods and services for my sister’s work-outs, so the occasional family birthday or holiday celebration would end up a feast created by someone more accustomed to catering events for Sarah Jessica Parker, Julia Roberts, Keith Richards, or Marc Jacobs. Continue reading →

I had the good fortune of getting to know Daniel Hoffman in the final years of his life. I was invited to join a group he had organized that got together for dinner periodically to read poems aloud. He was in his late eighties then — and still writing. He would bring new poems, as well as old ones, to our dinners and read them in an off-hand, conversational tone that belied the hidden complexities of much of his work.

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Not long ago, my husband and I attended a memorial service where the song “Morning Has Broken” was sung by an a cappella group. The voices filled the sunlit New England church where we were sitting with a sense of pure joy. Perhaps best known in its incarnation as a Cat Stevens hit in the early 1970s, it’s a hauntingly beautiful song that sounds as old as time. So I was surprised to learn that the lyrics were actually first published in 1931, written by the English author Eleanor Farjeon. It’s the music that the hymn is set to — a traditional Scottish Gaelic tune known as ‘Bunessan’ — that must account for its feeling of timelessness.

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by Richard Wilbur

There’s nothing quite as tempting and delicious at a cocktail party as a handful of mixed nuts that have been roasted and spiced, though it’s unlikely you’ll be able stop at just one handful. My sister-in-law Beverly, a first-class cook and the embodiment of Southern hospitality, seems to travel with a tin of these nuts — freshly roasted and redolent of spices— wherever she goes. Luckily for us, she brought some with her to our place over Thanksgiving, and we served them with a cheese tray and white wine. They disappeared instantly. Continue reading →

for Ros Krauss

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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 with a lighter-than-air concoction that perfectly balances fragrant spices and the subtle earthy flavor of freshly baked pumpkin. I’ve had some wonderful pumpkin pies over the years, but none of them, alas, made by me. Continue reading →

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, many valuable lessons in landscape design. So when I needed to create “the most beautiful garden in the Berkshires” for my new novel Bleeding Heart I found myself drawing heavily on both of them for inspiration. Continue reading →

Carmarthenshire, Wales  Photo © Corbis

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 knew still remembered and despised Thomas for his notoriously dissolute ways and carefully cultivated English accent. Mrs. James, my landlady, deemed Thomas and his wife Caitlin “disgusting” and Thomas’s famous radio play ‘Under Milkwood’ about Laugharne “a disgrace.” Continue reading →

O suns and skies and clouds of June,

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 at the knee of her charismatic raconteur of a father. I always assumed that Longfellow had also penned ‘October’s Bright Blue Weather’ until a recent search for the poem revealed its author to be Longfellow contemporary and Emily Dickinson confidante Helen Hunt Jackson. Continue reading →

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 flowers, as well as delicious, locally grown or made, organic eggs, milk, cheeses, and breads that you’re unlikely to come across anywhere else in the world. Most of the produce is less expensive than what you’ll find in a typical Paris supermarket — and it’s displayed with an imagination and flare that is uniquely French. Continue reading →