No longer pining for a pino
Every tree displays its beauty differently. The American Chestnut’s magnificent canopy. The Sugar Maple’s autumn color. The stark bark of a Quaking Aspen or Himalayan white birch. One of my wife’s favorites is the white pine. It is a lovely tree that grows straight and fast with fragrant, long cones and soft fluffy needles. When […]
Berry, berry nice
This summer’s incessant rains have been bad for many crops. Our strawberries matured as either red, flavorless mushy masses or tasteless slug bait. I expect the local crop of peaches to look more like inflated softballs and feel like a Nerf ball than they should when conditions are right. On the other hand, our raspberries […]
Biting the hand that feeds us
One of the anachronisms that I have enjoyed over the years has been a local farm that worked on the honor system. The Hickories is a lovely farm now run by Dina and Rob who sell a wide variety of veg and fruit at their farm stand as well as through a Community Support Agriculture […]
My Tom Sawyer moment
When it comes to gardening I prefer low tech. What this translates to is that I have no electrical or gas-driven tools to help me manage the jungle. An old pair of hedge trimmers quietly snip, snip away at the forsythia. My felcos dead head tulips, day lilies and the odd hosta spike. My scythe […]
Aggregating aggregate
To many, a garden evokes the simple and beautiful memories of flowers in front of large cascading green plants while strains of either Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons lingers in the background. And while these visions can be true, they are often counterbalanced by inordinate hours of backbreaking work that are better accompanied […]
Christmas in July
The wonderful thing about a garden is that you never really know what will grow and when. We can pretend that we know that if we plant a lettuce seed and follow the directions that it will sprout within a week. But sometimes that doesn’t happen for a variety reasons (poor soil, old seed, not […]
Dance with me
As we cannot often see what is occurring, the night is a quiet period for the senses and much of observable nature. But a simple light can illuminate and even create extreme circumstances. Last evening as my wife and I were heading for bed, the motion detector on the second floor eave clicked on a […]
Accidental housing
Surprises in the garden aren’t as rare as one might think though some are sweeter than others. Next to my vegetable garden I have one of my three compost heaps each placed on different parts of my property based more on my laziness to walk all my plant waste to a single location than the […]
Getting that good old-fashioned karma
Even though I read every guide book I can lay my hands on, when ever I travel I always discover a surprise. On this trip, my surprise is the result of a conversation with my good friend M.R. Rangaswami, who has one foot in the high-tech world and the other in a green one. As […]
Flora from Kauai
View Full Album One of the things that is great about going to a place like Kauai is that there is never an absence of life. You can’t swing a dead chicken or rooster (the Island’s birds) without hitting some fantastic looking flower or plant. Every breadth that you inhale is full of life-affirming scents […]