Liza Gyllenhaal — a writer in the garden

Except for a light dusting at the beginning of the month, it’s been a snowless December in the Berkshires.  Though hardly a dry one. The unusually inclement year is doubling down as it nears its end with rain forecast almost every day this week. The fields are water-logged. The road is mud. Our seasonal creek is overflowing its banks.  The ground has yet to freeze for more than a day or two at a time. Morning mists linger well into the afternoon.

Winter will surely arrive at some point.  But the demarcation lines between Continue reading →

All summer long a pair of blue jays flitted around one of our espaliered pear trees, hopping from the barn gutter to the ground to the top limb of the tree where they’d disappear into its leafy shadows. Despite all the feints and evasive maneuvers, it was clear that the jays were nesting. But it wasn’t until the last of the leaves had fallen a few weeks ago that I discovered where. Packed into the spikey circle of twigs at the tree’s crown, woven with moss and straw and pine needles, was a miracle of avian engineering that had blended perfectly into its surroundings.

The fall reveals so many things that had been hidden in plain sight by summer’s canopies of green: the cresting wave of Continue reading →

The back of the house as seen from the kitchen garden

Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay from 1925 until her death in 1950, is just over the hill from us in the Berkshires. A decade or so ago, after an extensive fundraising and restoration effort by the Millay Society, the house and grounds were opened to the public for tours, but financial setbacks forced the place to close again in 2018. We paid a visit recently during one of the rare occasions when the Continue reading →

We drove up to Provincetown on a recent trip to the Cape. The place was still in a summer mood with traffic bumper to bumper on Commercial Street in the East End and tourists lining up for ice cream on MacMillan Pier. But I was there in search of something that couldn’t be discovered in any of the bustling antique shops and art galleries, something I’d been longing to find for many years.

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Ranks of Queen Anne’s Lace have taken over the wildflower field this year — tall, pale, and lithe as ballerinas. This August’s endless rains have brought them to their knees time after time, but by morning they’ve sprung up again — seemingly taller and stronger than ever. Despite the royal title, Queen Anne’s Lace has quite humble origins: it’s actually wild carrot and considered to be edible in its first year of life. Like many wildflowers, it possesses a litany of uses. The Romans ate it as a vegetable and the American Colonists boiled the taproots to make wine. Its sugar content is second only to that of the beet among root vegetables, and it’s been employed as a sweetener in various cultures around the world. Continue reading →

Growing roses in the Berkshires is a thorny proposition at best. The season is too short. The winters too long. The weather unpredictable throughout the year. This summer, June was one endless dry spell while most of July seemed to have passed under a severe thunderstorm warning.  But even when conditions are at their best, the rewards tend to be fleeting. There’s usually about a two- week window between the moment the first blossoms unfurl to the morning when the advance guard of Japanese Beetles land like an invading army (or air force) on the roses’ delicate blooms. Continue reading →

I wish I could say that I grew these.  They look delicious, don’t they?  So sweet and juicy. The ones I did grow were coming along quite nicely, tiny white and yellow flowers abloom, bees bobbing among the bounty. The berries themselves — tight little balls of pale beige — began to form. Heads down, shyly, half-hidden under their blossom caps.  Then they started to flush — just the lightest tint of pink.  But the next day when I checked on them, they were gone. Disappeared. The whole berry patch dismantled. I know that I’ve only myself to blame. I should have been more careful. I’d noticed the chipmunks, scampering along the top of the split rail fence, casing the joint. And I could see that they were pilfering the odd berry or two as the fruit started to ripen. But I never imagined they’d be able to cart the whole crop away overnight. Continue reading →

Lilacs are flowering everywhere in the Berkshires now — in front yards, along the roadside, in a fallow field where a house once stood. Though seemingly delicate and fragile, lilacs are quite hardy and can live well into their seventh decade. Every spring, their blossoms fill the air with a potent fragrance that’s infused with longing — the mixture of “memory and desire” T. S. Eliot wrote about in the Wasteland. What is it about the sense of smell — the strongest of the human senses — that can transport us so quickly into the past?  Lilac was the signature Continue reading →

Barred owl

The phoebes are busy setting up housekeeping under our eaves.  All day long they swoop and whistle to each other — phoebe, phoebe — and pick through the dead grass to line their nests. They’re usually the first of the migratory birds to return to their breeding grounds, harbingers that another spring has arrived, that nature’s ancient rhythms are quickening again.  It’s a moment to cherish. Especially now that we know birds across the globe are vanishing from our skies in staggering numbers. Continue reading →

Forestwander.com

Early one recent morning, I looked out the kitchen window and saw an enormous cat sitting in the breezeway between our house and garage. Its back was towards me, but I could tell that it was watching the bird feeders, no doubt sizing up the breakfast menu.  It must have sensed me there, because it suddenly swiveled its head and stared straight at me with yellow eyes. I felt that I was gazing directly into the wild.  I was five feet away from a bobcat.
A second later, it slipped away around the side of the garage but not before I noticed that it had a bobbed tail and little black tufts on the tips Continue reading →

It seemed for a time, for most of January actually, that winter had passed us by. We racked up weeks of mild weather when the occasional rain segued into snow which melted politely away by morning. The daffodils started to push up.  The witch hazel shimmied with its gaudy gold and crimson tassels. Surely spring was right around the corner?  It was our year of magically thinking that we’d dodged the cold dark bullet that is February. Then the wind kicked in. The temperatures plummeted.  The muddy road froze solid with ruts as deep and hard as luge tracks. The rain turned to sleet. We woke up yesterday morning to a world made of glass: every tree and shrub and left-out Continue reading →

I love the way snow transforms the world around us in mysterious and beautiful ways. How the mountains disappear into the sky and the fields swell with drifts.  How the limbs of the spruces become draped with ermine and the last of the oak leaves — high up in the crown, gloved in white — clap wildly in the wind.  Snow lends itself to imagery — from Emily Dickinson’s “leaden sieves” and “alabaster wool” to Robert Frost’s extended metaphor of suicidal thoughts in “Stopping by Woods”—with, no doubt, thousands of other examples in between.  One of my favorites comes at the end of this poem by Robert Bly who died in Continue reading →

William Leaman/Alamy Stock Photo; Audubon Songbirds Calendar

I still depend upon printed weekly planners and wall calendars to keep track of my life. There’s something so satisfying about noting down all the important coming events in red ink by hand on actual paper at the beginning of each year. Something childishly exciting about thumbing through the neatly lined Filofax pages to discover what day of the week your birthday or anniversary will fall on. You hold your future in your hands in a way that I just don’t think is possible with digital versions of the same.  What I love most, though, is opening the Audubon Songbird wall calendar every year and seeing which birds will be featured in the twelve months ahead.  I was delighted to discover that the Eastern Bluebird, one of my favorites, is the bird of the month for June Continue reading →

In this in-between season, before the snow falls, when the light slants at a lower angle, the eye is drawn to what the foliage and flowers had kept hidden: the almost otherworldly beauty of lichens. Splayed across stones, spreading over old walls and rotting wood, lichens thrive in the most unlikely places. From sea level to alpine heights, lichens can grow in Arctic tundra, sandy deserts, rocky coastlines, even toxic slag heaps. Though they sometimes look moss-like, they’re not related to moss — or any other plant. Lichens are actually composite, symbiotic organisms: Continue reading →