It’s hard to explain the feeling of a whole hillside of azaleas in bloom. Blossoms rise in waves twice my height, blossoms thick on the bushes in clusters ...
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Olivia’s Overlook soothes and surprises on a spring day
Lie on your back up here with your feet under the lowbush blueberries and you can hear the wind around you like a river. The cups of the blueberry blossoms and a wild cherry sapling are quivering in the warm air.
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Candidly we need to cultivate our gardens … — #Berkshireweekend
The strawberry plants are small enough to hold in a palm, but some of them have blossoms forming. I’m cupping them in my hands and pressing them gently into the earth.
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Fresh cheese and sourdough: Farmers markets and plant sales — #Berkshireweekend
And suddenly it’s May. We feel the change coming for weeks, fizzing in catkins and lapping up the lower slopes — and then the sun comes out and the maples open their leaves, and the world turns green again.
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Lime Kiln Sanctuary gives a sunlit view in Spring
The sun came out, and the undergrowth turned softly green — ten minutes ago I’d been traveling in raw weather and now I’d found spring. I was walking through Lime Kiln Wildlife Sanctuary for the first time.
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Columbine and jazz: Warm days are coming — #berkshireweekend
The splash of red is vivid and unexpected — wild columbine. I wouldn’t have looked for them this early, or at this bend in the trail, with the white trillium growing thickly up the slope.
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Spring wildflowers and baby animals emerge — #Berkshireweekend
The bloodroot are back. I just went down to one of the closest places I know to look for them, out on the trail along the western bank of the Hoosic River.
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Early spring explorations near Stockbridge
Mill Brook Sugarhouse is boiling sap in a spring day around the corner from the Roaring Brook Trail, and Irish musicians are tuning up as I explore the Southern Berkshires.
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Sap and music rise on the edge of spring — #Berkshireweekend
By the scuffed ground around the bowl, I’m not the only small person who has found this magic circle. I’m out in the golden hour, walking on the lower loop through Hopkins Forest.
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Clay from an outdoor fire-pit carries ‘Volumes’
Wood-firing ceramics in an open-face pit is a volatile craft — Karlene Kantner can spend 12 hours and more stoking the fire when she makes the clay vessels she has shown at Berkshire Botanical Garden.
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