Ways of Seeing: Why so much time in the garden?

Most mornings, I step out the back door to check the weather, coffee mug in hand. Inevitably something in my garden beds cannot be left another minute.

June 20, 2025, with over 15 hours of daylight, is the official start of summer and a peak of abundance. With other ways you may have to celebrate the Summer Solstice, it’s a good time to visit gardens designed or transformed to align our lives more closel … (read more)

What’s going on in front of the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-Op this month? It looks as though plants have been pulled up and carted away. Is the outdoor eating area or the plant sale area expanding?

The air will be filled for hours with the enchanting buzz of neighbor lawn mowers. It’s so tempting to get outside to tidy up the yard with a haircut.

Happy Pollinator Week June 17-24. Yes, another way to celebrate our heroes, this time butterflies, moths, beetles, hummingbirds and, most importantly, the bees.

At age 31, I’d never worked with my hands. I experimented with hand tools as a kid at my father’s cellar workbench when he was working.

When classes resumed in late August at Beeman Elementary School in New Haven, it was time for pulling potatoes.

The writer Henry James has been quoted as saying the loveliest phrase in the English language is summer afternoon. I say add a visit to Monkton’s and Charlotte’s pollinator gardens on such an afternoon.

Imagine this: The five-year-old squats in damp dirt under a shrub willow. Her safe spot in the leafy stems was part of a hedgerow backed up against a neighbor’s wooden fence.

Some arrive in our gardens as invited guests, others on roadsides and riverbanks as stowaways. 

Mowing high, set to 5 instead of 3, allows wild plants in pesticide-free mowed areas to thrive under the cutting blade.

A white clapboard church sits on Route 116 in the center of Starksboro village. At the front steps of this Baptist church are two container gardens, now home to pollinator-friendly plants. 

If you’ve passed the flower garden at the Weybridge end of the Pulp Mill Bridge recently, you may have thought it looks unkempt, even dead. Not so, exclaim its gardeners.

“There’s something calming for me about getting my hands in the dirt,” Jenne Morton told me recently.

When Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, Jamila stayed up all night in Bridport, watching the news and talking to her family.