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...