Moriarty in the Garden
There are 28 references to weeds in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and almost all of them are mean. Weeds, according to Bartlett's chosen quotables, are variously dull, fat, filthy, oozy, poison, ...
Club Notes Type: Cultivating Wisdom
By Any Other Name
Let’s talk about plant names. It turns out that there’s a lot more to them than just daisy or dandelion or tomato. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s most-quoted line is, ...
Planting Grandpa’s Garden
Two years ago this month, Randy-my husband-and I bought my grandfather's house. The house is in northern Vermont, on the shores of Lake Champlain, within spitting distance of Canada: driving ...
Rupp on Rocks
We put in a strawberry patch this year. Nothing huge, you understand: maybe 4 feet by 20, a nice strip along the fence on the upper side of the barn. ...
Plant Blindness
“Attention,” wrote the late poet Mary Oliver, “is the beginning of devotion.”
She meant that – in these easily distractable modern times – it’s all too easy not to ...
Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening
A few weeks ago, in a burst of ambition and historical culture, Randy and I took the kids on a week-long vacation to Washington, D.C. We had a high old ...
Down Time
"Winter is icummen in," wrote Ezra Pound, in a fit of poetic ill temper. "Loud sing goddam."
Forget Chocolate Think Celery
Valentine’s Day, it turns out, owes a lot to Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th-century author of The Canterbury Tales. It was Geoffrey who pointed out – in a 1375 poem titled ...
Reading in the Garden
I read my first garden book surreptitiously, at the age of nine, at Girl Scout camp. Girl Scout camp, from my point of view, was not the happy and team-spirited ...
A Long Winter’s Nap
It’s December, the month that features Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Pearl Harbor Day, as well as such lesser under-appreciated holidays as National Sock Day, National Llama Day, World Pear Day, ...
