They don’t make Mother’s Day like they used to. Anna Jarvis, a stalwart Philadelphian, had made establishing the holiday her mission since her mother’s death in 1905. Her mother, Anna Maria Reeves Jarvis, herself a woman of spirit, had advocated for the creation of a Memorial Mother’s Day to honor the significant role of mothers […]

At this time of year, just as my thoughts turn to Easter, I think of gardening, and as soon as I think of gardening, I’m reminded of Easter, and then I’m back to gardening, and then back to Easter. If my toing and froing sounds like spring fever, well, it is. After all, let’s remember […]

Hello, Spring! When you arrive, the party gets started: life comes back to life. Springtime boosts our moods with radiant colors, enticing scents, and warmer, longer days. The dawn chorus of birds sing, “Hallelujah!” And here comes the Spring pageant of peas, asparagus, lettuce, strawberries and herbs. Spring, we can eat you! A less jubilant […]

The storied neo-noir film director Samuel Fuller observed, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.” This sums up the problem with winter: too realistic. When photographing a winter landscape, you must scrutinize the resulting image to detect any trace of color. Occasionally, a shrub’s foliage, berries, or a foraging robin will […]

To technology-glutted moderns, the celebration of the New Year may seem like a fleeting one-day inebriation, a hiccup in the 365-day trajectory it takes for our planet to complete one orbit around the sun. May their hangover cure include realizing that without the sun’s heat and light, they, like the Earth, would be a lifeless, […]

Late summer is a golden time for American gardeners, when their love and nurture of their plants are requited with whiz-bang vegetal yields in the American outdoor living room. This continuing harvest, amidst the elegiacally shortening daylength and fading daylight between the June solstice and September equinox, delivers on spring’s joyful promises and continues into […]

Hail spring, farewell winter, and a rousing welcome to the spring equinox for precisely positioning the earth—and us—in time and space. We watch in awe as the solar conductor rouses the vegetative orchestra to life, transforming fallow plots of land into flourishing gardens. Let there be life! The equinox provides a YOU ARE HERE moment […]

We now take a break from our dystopia to announce happy tidings for the new year. Welcome to 2022: the threshold of the American gardening revolution. The boom you’re hearing is not the launch of a billionaire’s ego-powered rocket or the sudden crash of a cryptocurrency. Reverberating across the country, the blast—a sonic bloom?—comes from […]

Let’s welcome the Estival Solstice, the first day of summer, a simple astronomical event with a stunning array of effects on Earth. Now begin gradually shorter days and longer nights, barely perceptible in late June’s splashy technicolor landscape. In a single moment, the sun’s course reverses, beginning a gradual pivot, arcing from the northern to […]

The first day of spring kicks off the unofficial national gardening holiday everywhere in the northern hemisphere. In the US, gardeners are celebrating riotously. For the largely quiet home gardening business, this year started with a bang—no, an explosion. On the heels of 2020, a breakthrough year for seed buying, 2021 has already produced sales […]