Before becoming glittery mall hang-outs, bookstores varied from city to city and included dusty holes that somehow fit vast collections of used books. As kids, we used to tunnel for hours through these marvelous places. I discovered Out Of The Night by Jan Valtin, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, and My Eskimo Friends […]

I lived in an old converted turkey coop at boarding school in rural northern Arizona. For a teenager, it provided heavenly solitude. A small bathhouse—serving maybe 25 other boys—sat about two hundred yards away on the opposite bank of an arroyo. My “one man cabin” was the size of about two rows of 3 across coach seating on a 747, at the most. Large canvas awning-like flaps covered screened windows…

My next project is night gardening. Once during the Q & A part of a speech I gave in New York City, a petite elderly lady popped up and asked, “What do you offer for a night garden?” I mumbled something about moonflowers, four o’clocks and an especially iridescent pale petunia I’ve since forgotten. But […]

I played high school varsity football, joining surprisingly but indifferently in my freshman year, because on the one hand I was an unusually large kid, and on the other I found boarding school a distracting environment. I couldn’t get into the “Kill, Kill, Kill!” spirit. I was too green, the only freshman on the team.But […]

A current rage is “The Asian Challenge”: how to respond to their explosive growth, power and influence, and how to relate to Asians as individuals, families, neighbors and communities. Toyota will soon pass General Motors in size; our local supermarket sells vegetables grown, frozen and shipped from China; and over the last ten years, about […]

I cannot honestly remember being as excited as over the last week, since the announcement of the discovery of the earth-like exoplanet, GL 581c, which deserves a better name.While the possibility of human life may be remote, plant life may be abundant due to the old age of the planet and the low light levels, both which would promote evolution. Testing GL 581c’s botanical life will be an honor bestowed…

A charming walk-around city, like a miniature version of London, Boston has nevertheless succumbed to the excesses of urban planning over the last 30 years, since I rambled around there. I lost my way last weekend on streets I knew perfectly in the 70s. It’s disconcerting to pass by chain restaurants and mall stores on Newbury and Boylston, but there it is. Actually a very small city—just over 500,000—Beantown still…

While we recommend you wear old shoes and pack an umbrella when you visit our Hellebore Open on April 20 and 21, we promise you will be greatly rewarded with a full day of unprecedented early spring beauty.

Unbeatable value, too.

Imagine what a five dollar ($5.00) entry fee—refundable as credit for a plant purchase—gets you these days, and you cannot even dream up anyone to match our offer of a day…

My mom once asked me which sense I’d give up if I had to, sight or hearing? A teenager at the time, I wondered if it was a trick question. I thought about the blind people I’d seen tapping their canes along the sidewalks, and answered, “Hearing”. She told me she’d give up sight. I […]

Sometime in the mid 70s, I celebrated a party with friends at a then-landmark French restaurant in Chicago—the first of the “nouvelle”—called Le Perroquet. (There I tasted my first “mesclun” salad.) As we talked and dined I discerned, through the wine haze, that the place was utterly unique. Outside New Orleans, New York or San Francisco, no place like it existed, since fish was the focus. Thirty years ago, old…