The sun is coming out today for an hour or two. Where should we go for a walk? It’s one of those unexpected early spring days that jumps ahead for a flicker, like that afternoon in mud time in the Robert Frost poem …
Read articleThe Berkshires are rich in walks and hikes — gentle rambles in the hills and treks along the Appalachian Trail, and anything in between. Kayak on a mountain lake or get a taste of white water.
Looking for fall brightness on the back roads (Oct. 1 newsletter)
Color has come all at once this weekend. … The leaves let the light through, and here for a stretch the woods are rich and sunlit and almost too bright to look at. I can’t ever take it for granted.
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Ground/Work gathers international artists at the Clark
Songbirds were flying through the sculpture. … I was walking slowly along Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw, one of the six new works in the Clark Art Institute’s first outdoor sculpture show, Ground/Work.
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Northern orchids bloom in Hawley Bog
Orchids grow here. I knelt on the boardwalk, balanced over the floating peat mat, to look up under the hanging blossom of a rose pogonia.
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Pitcher plants and wild bloom iris in Hawley Bog
Half a mile from the trailhead, the boardwalk heads into ferns almost as tall as I am, and I’ve only seen a place like this once or twice before. It’s been eight years since I came to Hawley Bog.
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Coming round the mountain at Pleasant Valley
It was a Saturday in the middle of May, and the day was warm in the sun, and I decided to take a walk at Mass Audubon’s Pleasant Valley Sanctuary in Lenox. It didn’t go as planned — gloriously.
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Thom Smith looks for giants — old growth trees
Old growth woods have never been harvested. As much as 70 percent of the Berkshires’ woods were cut down between the arrival of the first European colonists and the Civil War — but in pockets, often in hard-to-reach places, giant trees still grow.
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10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival warms up downtown
The 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival is in town, and Pittsfield is at play. Every year in late February, downtown Pittsfield holds a weeklong celebration with art and music, new plays, independent film and more.
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Movement and light come to the Berkshires midway between winter and spring (By the Way column)
Sunday is midwinter, halfway between the first day of winter and the first day of spring, and in the Berkshires energy is stirring in performances like Vuyani Dance Company’s Cion, on college campuses and in the woods.
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The Berkshires welcome winter solstice with firelight and evergreens (BTW column)
We have almost reached the longest night of the year, and for hundreds of years people have taken time for it around the world, and in the Berkshires too.
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