Yellow ranks of milkweed, their pods bursting with seeds, line the edges of our fading wildflower field where they stood sentry all summer. I spent years encouraging them to naturalize and, now, along with the lupines, echinacea, and blue lobelia, they routinely come back and spread a little farther every spring. At full height, they’re ungainly plants, to be honest. Pods, leaves, and flower...
We’ve lost many trees to storms and disease over the years. The enormous old hemlock beside the barn that Sandy twisted off its foundation, exposing a root system as clunky and complicated as an old-fashioned telephone switchboard. The ancient willow that began shedding its mighty limbs with dangerous abandon and had to be euthanized. One of the three blue spruces that we planted almost thirty...
I was unexpectedly obliged to spend several weeks of July in upper Manhattan. It was a scorching, humid stretch of time, the sidewalks shimmering under an unrelenting sun. The city tends to absorb heat, like the black clothing preferred by so many of its stylish denizens, adding to the uneasy sense that the whole place might self-combust at any moment. It finally did one night when a gargantuan...
I tried for years to grow lupines (or lupins or bluebonnets) in one of my garden beds. I chose a sunny spot with moist, well-drained soil which I read they preferred, but they weren’t happy there. One or two of them would come back in the spring, but they were sad spindly things and would collapse within a few weeks. Finally, fed up, I pulled them out and tossed them into my wild flower field...
The daffodil heads have shriveled. The tulips stand naked, their bright silk half-slips scattered on the ground. The lilacs are blooming now, the scent intoxicating the air, spent flowers drifting like snowflakes across the lawn (an image stolen from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem below). It’s almost cold enough to snow. Though spring keeps moving through its paces, the temperatures remain stuck in the...
In the middle of winter when the world was a silent blanket of snow, I heard someone whistling to me as I carried in firewood from the garage. I only had to glance at the empty birdfeeder to know who it was: a black-capped chickadee, reminding me it was time for a refill. These delightfully friendly, vocal little birds are our constant companions in the winter months. When the rest of the world...