For 32 years, I wrote every “At the Gate” column published in this magazine. This issue marks the end of the first year GreenPrints has been under Mequoda’s stewardship, so I asked if I might sneak back in this time and share a word.  READ MORE 

Georgia A. Hubley: The Nevada-based writer says: “At Christmas, I reflect on growing up in rural Ohio on a dairy farm.” Her work appeared in Issues 88, 104, and 117.

Alice Helen Masek: This CA grandmother is a group papercutting artist, writer, composer, rock painter, weaver, and gardener.  READ MORE 

At Christmastime, I like to think back to the mid-1950s when I was 10 years old. It was the beginning of my two-week Christmas vacation. I had big plans for when I got home, but our 70-acre Ohio farm was 10 miles from school. The long bus ride home seemed endless.  READ MORE 

Karel Čapek was a 20th-century Czech writer, playwright, and science fiction author who was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and invented the word “robot.”   READ MORE 

From my angle, The Boysenberry Saga started when Paul, my husband Mike’s brother, married Carrie, his talented, upbeat lady fair in 1976. It was at their wedding reception that I learned that Carrie was a member of the Boysen family (her mother’s maiden name) and what that meant.  READ MORE 

When our good friends Kirby and Naoko Rude made a last-minute request that we babysit their pet guinea pig while they vacationed, I didn’t flinch. True, I wasn’t a pet person, but I had grown a marvelous tropical garden from scratch. Flowers, fruits, and vegetables filled our dinner table. How hard could it be to look after a little furry mammal for a couple of weeks?  READ MORE 

My wife and I were beaming. We were attending our first parent-teacher conference and receiving all sorts of accolades from Lance’s kindergarten teacher regarding our son. He was respectful, followed directions, knew all the vowel and consonant sounds, and colored within the lines.  READ MORE 

I am in LOVE with daffodils. Have been for years. Ahem! Make that decades, about five of them as an adult. I’m not sure I ever noticed the wonder of daffodils during my wild-and-woolly youth. But somewhere along the way to adulthood, they grabbed my attention.  READ MORE 

Winter isn’t the season for everyone. “I shudder at the approach of Winter,” wrote Thomas Jefferson from his mountaintop in (cold) Virginia to John Adams in (colder) Massachusetts. “Winter is icummen in,” wrote poet Ezra Pound (Idaho). “Lhude sing Goddamm.”  READ MORE 

My father was one of the greatest gardeners I have ever known. He wasn’t much for flowers. “You can’t eat flowers,” he always said. But he grew everything else—tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, asparagus, and so on. You name the crop, he knew the trick to make it grow.  READ MORE 

As I have previously recounted in these pulse-pounding pages, the amazingly talented Hall of Fame ballplayer Rogers Hornsby (third-best batting average in all of baseball history!) was once asked by a reporter, “What do you do in the off-season?  READ MORE 

When I moved to a new community—Amana, Iowa—I suddenly found myself needing a new circle of friends. My job was out of town and my children out of school, so I knew friends might be hard to find.  READ MORE 

Finally, this year, we took the time for some long overdue planting. The plants themselves weren’t very extraordinary: three small ivy topiaries and one bougainvillea tree. We gently removed them from the pots where they had long been residing and lowered them into the soft, cool earth.  READ MORE 

Ever since I first read about Vita Sackville-West’s white garden at Sissinghurst, I had to create one of my own. She was my definition of a real gardener—writing in the morning and gardening the rest of the day.  READ MORE 

The last time I hosted the family Thanksgiving, my sister Sonia brought me a moth orchid. It was nothing special, although it was pretty, and a bit of a novelty in those days before orchids took over the floral department of every grocery store in America.  READ MORE 

In the two years I took to write my book, 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names (Algonquin Press), I had ample opportunity to think about differences between birders and gardeners, and the people in between who love both their gardens and the birds that visit them.  READ MORE 

In 2018, I found myself working in a flower shop in up-state New York on Valentine’s Day. I opened at 7 a.m., and at 11 a.m. in walks the doctor who had delivered my son less than 30 hours ago. I knew he was coming, because I had scrawled his name on a piece of white tissue paper when he phoned in an order earlier in the day.  READ MORE