Author Archives: Liza

  A few years back on an early June night a storm raged through the Berkshires, downing trees and knocking out power. Our elderly weeping willow was sheared nearly in half. A massive tangle of shattered limbs and willow wands … Continue reading →

Sorrel’s at its best early in the season, leafing out in the Berkshires about the same time fiddleheads and morels are putting in their own brief appearances. Like them, it has a pungent flavor, redolent of the soil from which … Continue reading →

Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies, Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows. I envy you, drunk with flowers; Butterflies swirling in your dreams. – ‘Visit to the Hermit Chui’ by Qian Qi (Tang Dynasty)   I first fell in … Continue reading →

I think we all probably associate certain plants with particular events and people in our lives. The smell of pear blossoms or pine bows, hyacinths or lilacs, can sweep me into the past as magically as a madeleine once transported Proust. I was struck by … Continue reading →

The growing season in the Berkshires is at least two weeks behind this year. It wasn’t until late April that I finally glimpsed one of the first signs of spring in our fenced-in vegetable garden: chive shoots — fine as cat whiskers — poking up through the … Continue reading →

The shoes put on each time 
left first, then right…    —from ‘Habit’  by Jane Hirshfield   I planted pansies (Viola x wittrockiana) a few days ago in our window box and in the old cement urn I inherited from my … Continue reading →

Nature’s first green is gold,  Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. … Continue reading →

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light!                       — Edna St. … Continue reading →

I was given several canna lily rhizomes by a neighbor a few years back.  They were long and knobby, pale as parsnips, caked with dirt and dangling hairy roots. “They’re beautiful when they start to grow,” my neighbor assured me. … Continue reading →

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing … Continue reading →

 And I think of roses, roses, White and Red, in the wide six-hundred-foot greenhouses, And my father standing astride the cement benches, Lifting me high over the four-foot stems, the Mrs. Russells, and his             own elaborate hybrids, And how … Continue reading →

The wind was high on Florida’s Captiva Island this morning, whipping up whitecaps on the usually placid Gulf of Mexico and forcing the row of staid palms along the beach to bend southward in rigorous, calisthenic formation.  But less than a … Continue reading →

We like March — his shoes are Purple. He is new and high — Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler — Makes he Forests Dry — Knows the Adders Tongue his coming And begets her spot — Stands the … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →