Musings on horticultural therapy and the soothing effects of plants and nature
Santa and relatives were very good to me this year as I received a surfeit of books and tools for the garden. One of the books, Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart, was a real eye opener as I never realized how dangerous and deadly are many of the plants that reside in our garden. I […]
This is the longest stretch I have not been blogging since I started this endeavor almost six months ago. It has not been for lack of topics but rather lack of time as the Christmas season can easily consume any spare moments. Making preparations for Santa more than makes up for the time I get […]
It seems as if Mother Nature wants we Northeasterners to no longer think of gardening as she continues to drop the white stuff our way. We shouldn’t feel singled out, however, as many areas of the U.S. have been dumped on earlier than is characteristic. After breakfast I went outside in a light rain to […]
We went to get our Christmas tree this past weekend but before we left we got a two-inch blast of snow that left a clear coat of white over the garden and the rest of the yard. So before the snow arrived I took one last tour of the garden to see if there had […]
One of the challenges in the discipline of horticultural therapy is that it is not well-understood or promoted. Googling “horticultural therapy” gets you 60,600 hits compared with over 9 million for Paris Hilton. So I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I read two stories in the New York Times that dealt with the healing […]
Yesterday’s Thanksgiving feast that was held at many homes throughout the United States is often assumed to be all about turkey (and overeating.) My family went on the Turkey Trot held by the local Boys & Girls club in the early morning. The New York Times and our local paper recently ran articles about how […]
I took Wednesday off to play golf with my son-in-law Alan. He also had the day off and the weather was turning to the better from being forecast as the worst so we figured it would be a good way to hang out together and have some fun. While I used to be an avid […]
Being an early riser I have always loved to walk the garden in the morning. I don’t know why, as if like the fable, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” a huge vine will manifest itself the day after I have planted it. But I believe that I enjoy being out and around early because it is […]
As a gardener, there are many things that can be done to ensure that whatever we plant grows well. We can recondition the soil with compost, manure and other enhancements; we can plant items best suited to the environment; and we can tend to our gardens faithfully. But the one thing we can’t do is […]
The weather this fall has been frenetic. Snow, heat, drenching rain, drought. We have seen it all. Or so I thought. Last week in a middle of a stretch of Indian summer we were invaded by Mexican bean beetles. Thousands. I don’t know much about its life cycle but I think the snow and cold […]