Kristen Tool and her husband, Chris Wheeler, keep six hives near a massive apple tree that has lived here, like his family, for a hundred years. They are building contemporary ways to support their family farm — and food systems and food security in the Berkshires at the same time.
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We’re feeling for balance as the year turns (September 8 newsletter)
Broad Brook is running high for September. We’re up here at the top of White Oak Road, just on the line between one state and another, and we’re taking time on a weekday morning, because this is a holiday for you.
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How to meet a mountain in the rain (August 25 newsletter)
You can see 90 miles from here on a clear day. We can see about 30 feet across the meadow. Up here on the summit of Mount Greylock at the end of a storm, we’re islanded in cloud.
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Meadows turn golden below three-mile ridge (August 18 newsletter)
The day is bright with a heat we rarely feel up here in the mountains, and the brook runs shallow here in the sand with Joe Pye weed on the banks …
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Late summer blooms under the boardwalk at Jackson Pond
The pines open into cat-tails, and the view widens into dense deep green, and I'm looking across the marsh and the water to Yokun Ridge.
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Sculpture waits on the wildflower walk at Bennington Museum
A quiet man in a hoodie closes his eyes as though he’s praying, and in the meadow above him a man with rainbowed wings turns in the sun. At Bennington Museum the art is moving, and it’s coming out.
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Exploring Cummington and the hilltowns in summer
It’s quiet up here. Sometimes I’ll come up to the ridge to get away for awhile, out the back roads … and find unexpected and creative places.
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Wing and a Prayer wildflowers glow in high summer
I’m up at Amy Pulley’s native plant nursery on the ridge in Cummington, and it’s transformed in July into a sea of meadow flowers …
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Sculpture takes natural forms at The Mount
He’s a massive figure standing here at the top of the hill … Jamie Burnes’ life-sized bison made from Corten steel and locust wood looks out into the summer sculpture show at the Mount.
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Stone, bronze and glass are Taking Flight in the garden
Glass tiles gleam like stone under water. They reflect light in wide eyes. Two owls look out of a mosaic in a stucco wall that seems to ease into the land around it, like a new outcrop from a vanished temple …
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