Musings on horticultural therapy and the soothing effects of plants and nature
The Boston area, where my daughter Sarah lives, has been the epicenter of extremely nasty New England winter weather. In the Nutmeg State, we have had our share of the cold and snow, but nothing like Sarah and her neighbors. For me the last few months have been focused on family chores, shoveling, keeping the […]
Sitting in the back yard resting between gardening jobs it is easy to notice the changing sounds of the season. One often doesn’t think of seasonal sounds, but there are many, easy to discern in the absence of cars, lawn mowers and other mechanized devices. I am lucky in that we live on a quiet […]
August is the time of year when it seems almost unnecessary to go to the supermarket as our garden produces more food than we can consume. We are awash in berries, greens, beans, tomatoes and cuks. It sometimes gets a little repetitive. “More beans?,” says Juana as I bring in enough for us every evening. […]
To start a new garden is one of my biggest joys. Sometimes there is a bit of trepidation as I ask myself, “Do I really need yet another space to manage?” But as I have aged, a key design criterion is to build spaces that are fairly self-sufficient with minimal need for weeding. So with […]
As bleak as the winter and spring have been in the garden, the summer appears to be making up for it. We have long since cut down and dug up all the dead plants, the roses and butterfly bushes, letting the existing perennials and opportunistic annuals take their place. A few, like the fig tree […]
One of my granddaughter Charlotte’s favorite videos now is the wonderful E.B.White story, Charlotte’s Web, which tells the story of how the smart spider Charlotte keeps Wilbur the pig off the dinner plate. One of the major characters of the tale is Templeton, a lazy and eventually corpulent rat who gathers words for Charlotte to […]
Well not really. Back in the Nutmeg State after nearly a month in Florida I am typing between shoveling expeditions as we are in the midst of yet another Nor’easter. Apparently after I left for warmer climes, Connecticut like much of the country, had been hit by wave after wave of bad weather. In the […]
Before the frost, I took stock of my garden and started to bed down and clean up the soil. We have had an unusually warm and dry fall and yet to have a frost by the end of October. But such luck was about to run out as the forecast predicted an evening in the […]
We came back from a two-week tropical in the land of mangos, papayas and tropical fish to falling leaves, colder temperatures and a lower, less intense sun. While the warmth of the past week or so has been welcome, it is but a last gasp tease of what we had will no longer be. A […]
It was strange to see woolly bear caterpillars in late July. These inaccurate prognosticators of winter usually make their appearances in late August or early September as a first brush with cooler winds reminds us that fall is just around the corner. But this buggy memento of changing weather was not the only hint that […]