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...