Good landscaping isn’t about taking a plot of land and turfing it with mono-green grass as far as the eye can see. (That’s called a golf course.) Good landscaping is about listening to your environment and carefully crafting a relationship that allows you both to thrive. For hundreds (if not thousands) of years, humans have...
By Robin Catalano Photo Credit: The Mount Say the name Edith Wharton, and classic American novels like Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and The House of Mirth come to mind. But for gardeners and nature lovers, Wharton’s name evokes a different kind of reverence, for the stunning gardens the author—also a talented interior and landscape designer—created in 1901...
I know it might sound oxymoronic–or in other words impossibly contradictory–but the simple act of disconnecting in order to connect is a powerful practice. Case in point: the overwhelming prevalence of technology free summer camps. My 14-year-old daughter just returned from two weeks of horseback riding in Connecticut, and her iphone sat on top of...
This is a book that tells many stories; of family legacy apple varieties, strawberries too delicate to survive a market and trying to live off grid right out of college. The main narrative follows the authors personal journey to find a space to explore his own passions of growing and sharing heirloom plants and produce to...
Fall has now arrived and as I drink my coffee in the morning I watch squirrels moving around at a frantic pace getting ready for winter. Like squirrels we to seem to adopt this crazy pace after kids are back in school with their activities and with our mental checklists of items that have to...
by Chris Johnson This is a common question from friends and family who wonder why I enjoy manual labor when they see me favoring an injury or the sound of the creaks and cracks that my body makes when I get up. There isn’t a simple answer, I have a bachelors degree, I could have...
by Matthew Segatti “Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to stay at home, so we can learn the names of the plants and animals around us; so that we can begin to know what tradition we’re part of.” -Terry Tempest Williams I enjoy my own yard as much as I enjoy a...
I have always been fascinated by the seemingly endless lengths of stone walls in the woods around the Berkshires. A silent reminder that the woods were not always so, and that up until around a hundred years ago, most of the wooded areas that we are so used too, were open fields. This was due...
by Chris Johnson My interest in looking at plants when I traveled started in my early teens. I remember visiting my grandparents at their winter home in Coronado California. I was walking past this stately conifer in front of the library when I realized it was a Norfolk Island Pine. It was easily 80 feet...
Krishna on Work To action alone thou hast a right, never to all its fruits, let not the fruits of action be thy motive neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction. Standing firm in yoga, do thy work O Winner of wealth, (Arjuna), abandoning attachment, with an even mind in success and...
