How I learned to stop worrying and enjoy not being able to garden
Maybe some people come home from their full time jobs and put in a couple hours of gardening before dinner. I am not one of them. I have to hope [...]
Elizabeth Licata
I thought nobody could hate this flower. I was wrong.
There was a luxuriant stand of it in my grandparent’s garden. It fascinated me as a child and I would be hard put to say whether the tiny waxy bells [...]
Foraging is all about the hunt, not the catch
A column I recently wrote about foraging seemed filled with garden-related corollaries. In order to write it, I contacted a couple of longtime foragers and followed them through the mud, [...]
A salute to forsythia in poetry and prose
With a poem by Barbara Browne Ah, forsythia. It’s brief season is coming to a close here in Western New York, but over the past couple weeks I think I [...]
The effects of our racist and exclusionary history linger – even in gardening
Lone Tree, Thomas Pereira 2020 Do those of us who have rejected traditional lawn-focused front gardens in favor of edible or perennial alternatives need to check our privilege? [...]
Just another day of watching the sun
Eclipse image by Luc Viatour (wikipedia commons) Nature is the clear winner in my informal tally of where people want to watch the April 8 solar eclipse. Yes, [...]
Welcoming the snowflakes of spring
Spring, you say? Tell that to my snow-covered patio furniture and the frozen mound of earth covering last week's front garden excavations. Tell that to my friend Kathy, who just [...]
Gardeners plan, municipal infrastructure laughs
This, too, will pass. But for now, I deliberately avoid looking out our front windows or even walking past the front of the house. It is a mess. The dysfunction [...]
If you don’t influence me, I won’t influence you
Dale Carnegie might have difficulty recognizing the influencers of today. I’ve never read his book How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936 and 1981), but from what I've read [...]
A season of bare trees and gray light
Gray is known as a scale rather than a color in the world of photography. I like that word for it; it evokes music. The outside world in Western New [...]
For my houseplants, Darwin said it best
How could a person with so little respect for houseplants have so many? That’s what I’m wondering as I settle into another winter of indoor plant care. I’ll never act [...]
That time a white Christmas became a nightmare
It’s beginning to look a lot like a green Christmas here in Buffalo and nobody’s complaining. Not after last December’s blizzard. My husband and I were lucky. We were home, [...]