WHILE A BALD EAGLE CIRCLED OVERHEAD one sunny day last week, this guy let me sit beside him on the still-cold grass and visit awhile. Say hello to a wood frog, one of the earliest species to be out and hopping about, and dressed in garden-appropriate terra cotta, no less. Sometimes I don’t know how I got from where I was to here, but am I ever thankful. Learn more about the wood frog, Rana sylvatica, and our impromptu chat:
hey, mr. bigstuff: a wood frog stops by
March 31, 2009
my april garden chores
March 30, 2009
APRIL IS THE MONTH THAT UNHINGES me slightly, and then comes May, when I just come apart. That said, it’s also pure heaven, this thing called spring: the affirmation each day of possibility and potential coming true before your eyes, the magic. What died will make itself known this month…and what lived will scream for your attention, all at once. And not in harmony. (PS: The chores are being published early this month because you don’t think I’m going to tell you what to do on April Fool’s, do you? Too easy an out!) [Read more...]
the sunniest of bulbs: eranthis hyemalis
March 29, 2009
I AM ALWAYS RELIEVED TO SEE THE WINTER ACONITE, Eranthis hyemalis, welcome the honeybees in early spring; happy for both of these harbingers to be with me once again. The sunny-yellow Eranthis flowers (like the gradually opening hellebores nearby, with their even-larger nectaries) are real bee magnets. This little bulb (it’s technically a tuber) can be “hard to establish” but is well worth coaxing into a state of cooperation, as I seem to have finally done in a widening self-sown drift. Read more about how in my post from one year ago this week, updated with new photos.
giant pussy willow: salix chaenomeloides
March 28, 2009
THE GIANT OR JAPANESE PUSSY WILLOW is screaming for attention out by the road today. Not that it wants me to actually do anything; just to ooh and ahh at how flashy its catkins are, at nearly 2 inches long. I suppose that warrants a closer look, no? [Read more...]
a favorite poem to mark passings in the garden
March 27, 2009
I DIDN’T PROPERLY MARK THE PASSING of the great gardener Geoffrey Charlesworth last spring, who in the late 1980s wrote a book I particularly treasure called “The Opinionated Gardener” (no, not a biography of me; Charlesworth, to his great credit, was even more so, and vastly more expert). His garden was not so far away from where I live, and were he here to welcome spring this year, I suspect that he, too, would be hoping for the best while poking about in the dirt as he cleaned up the beds. In memory, then, of Geoffrey Charlesworth, and of all the garden’s great creatures who haven’t made it to the newest season, I share a poem of his: “Why Did My Plant Die?” [Read more...]
doodle by andre: a snail’s space
March 26, 2009
APPARENTLY WE ARE IN A CONTEMPLATIVE MOOD this week, not raucous or irreverent or even downright wild. Yes, doodler Andre Jordan and I have moments of reflection, you know…it’s not just all go-go-go with us; sometimes it’s at a snail’s pace. (By the way, have you read Andre’s memoir yet?)
I WAS BLESSED TO visit many of the nation’s finest homemade gardens for 15 years for ‘Martha Stewart Living,’ first as garden editor and then as editorial director. The places we published included my upstate New York home. Take a tour of 
