I met a dragon in the ruins at Ashintully. A live one — really. She’s a bearded dragon named Phoebe, and she came up with a young couple exploring the hills …
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Comfort food (for thought) in stormy weather
Mountain Meadow opens out in a long arc. It’s a warm day after these weeks of single digits, and the snow is soft underfoot, like wet sand on the tideline.
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Internationally acclaimed artist Doug Aitken launches New Horizon
It will gleam like lake water and drift in a clear sky. In late July, the internationally acclaimed artist Doug Aitken will bring a new work to the Berkshires. And it will fly. New Horizon is an abstract sculpture and a moving stage — and a hot air balloon. By […]
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Ashintully’s Gilded Age ruins shelter a garden on a Hill
Four standing Doric columns are holding up the sky. They mark the site of Ashintully, the last remains of a Georgian-style mansion lost to fire in 1952. The columns guarded the entrance to a 35-room turn-of-the-20th-century “Berkshire Cottage.” Now the serenity of the view of brilliant white columns along the shore […]
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Mountain Meadow on a fall morning
Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith takes a fall walk in the northern hills. With land in Pownal Vermont and Williamstown, Massachusetts, I cannot think of a lovelier autumn walk than the preserve we call Mountain Meadow. Choose an afternoon with few clouds, when walking will be even more pleasurable if skies are […]
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Thom Smith explores Bartholomew’s Cobble in wildflower season
Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith recalls a walk through Bartholomew’s Cobble, a Trustees of reservations Property in Sheffield along the Housatonic River.
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Bartholomew’s Cobble guides explore the woods in the bare season
A week ago, I watched Carrianne Petrik-Huff take the temperature of a skunk cabbage. The thermometer, held inside the curl of the young plant, read 36 degrees — almost 20 degrees warmer than the outside air.
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Field Farm looks to Frank Lloyd Wright for Modern design
In the Folly, bright panels of Modern paintings hang on the curved stone wall behind the couch and a broad window looks out across the pond and the hayfields. On the lawn bees hum in the azaleas, and a metal sculpture of a woman looks over her drawn-up knees to […]
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Wildflowers run wild at Bartholomew’s Cobble
Trillium cover a hillside with wide three-corner flowers and the pungent odor of … old socks. “Remind you of your locker room days?” said Carrieanne Petrik-Huff, laughing, after a wildflower walk at Bartholomew’s Cobble.
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