Trees that looked bare five days ago are shaggy with seed pods, and in the Berkshire Botanical Garden, magnolias are shedding petals. I love seeing things from the inside while people are working in their everyday clothes.
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Vivid color is coming back to Naumkeag (May 5 Newsletter)
The tulips are glowing around the greenhouse at the foot of the hill, crimson red and flame orange and lemon. … I’ve caught an hour of sunlight on the morning I slipped down to Stockbridge for the daffodil festival, and it feels like pure radiant luck.
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Flights of Fancy bring sparkling color to the garden
Growing up on a farm in Hong Kong, Mindy Lam saw the bright flashing colors of birds, and moths as large as her two hands. She would wade in the river, looking for shrimp and minnows and dragonflies. So it means a great deal to her now, as an internationally known jewelry artist living near Washington D.C., to bring her creations to the Berkshire Botanical Garden.
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A strong couple hold ‘The Light’
They are holding each other at the end of a long day, talking the way people talk when their lives fit together. The rhythm moves easily between them from banter to reflection … When an anniversary gift leads them to reveal some of the hardest times in their pasts, two people who love each other struggle to keep their relationship alive.
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Feel the earth under our feet again (April 21 newsletter)
‘You have a moth on your neck,’ she said. We were sitting outdoors on either side of the fire, on a lawn that stretched into fields. Somewhere farther up the hill, land conservancy trails waltz with the brook.
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Baby animals return to the Shaker farm
Bill Mangiardi holds a lamb a few days old. She has a twin brother, and their mother has not been feeding them equally, so Mangiardi offers her a bottle of warm milk from a generous nanny goat. …
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Greenhorns film seeks a new generation of farmers
A child licks the dasher from a hand-crank ice cream maker. A young couple bake bread in a brick oven. Greens sprout in a warehouse in Oakland, and a cheesemonger opens a stall at a green market in Manhattan. ... From Northeast hills to bay-area sprawl, they all belong to a new generation of farmers.
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Young farmers celebrate the land
They are awake in the dark, washing last week’s milk bottles. They are kneeling in the birthing pen, holding a newborn kid goat. They are setting out seedlings in trays and tuning up the 1940s tractor.
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Native seeds and pollinators are stirring at Wing and a Prayer
Each kind is a different shape, a fiber surrounded in soft down, or a golden-brown fleck, or a sleek husk. It’s warm in the hoop house on a sunny April afternoon at Amy Pulley’s native plant nursery in Cummington.
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Chasing wildflowers on the Dome and Agawon Trail (April 14 newsletter)
It’s the first time I’ve ever taken my shoes off in the woods to get a better grip. It’s the first time in New England I’ve ever wound up on a trail so steep I can imagine sliding straight off the mountain. …
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