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I have been missing Japan like mad lately, so this post takes a temporary detour from nature and the gardening life into the contours of my other spiritual home. I fell in love with Japan at the age of seven. You rarely recover from an intense childhood crush. I had found my mom’s old high […]

I’ve heard late fall being tenderly referred to as a season of ‘sweet disorder.’ A new morning chill suggests that first frost is likely on the horizon, and with it the closing of the growing season. Deciduous trees are showing their true colors as chlorophyll fades, revealing the bold pigments that were always already there, […]

I’ve lost my glasses Daydreaming while pulling weeds Blurry has its charm

“If I allowed myself to have any longings beyond what is given, they would be for a nook quite in the country, far away from Palaces crystal or otherwise, with an orchard behind me full of old trees and rough grass, and hedgerow paths among the endless fields where you meet nobody.” George Eliot’s correspondence, […]

This week: are we headed, perhaps, out of poetry and back into the world of stone-cold facts? Not so. I am here to remind you that facts can be very poetic, and poetry quite factual, and that biology and feelings are not dual poles but mingled juices in your pumping, loving, heart. In ecology, the […]

This week’s post is a short poem. I am trying to capture the way our physical experiences of the world tune us to what Life calls us to become. When life’s beautiful little details Catch me by the throat I know that truth is indeed ungentle And cannot be cajoled Still— revelation comes, at times, […]

Monday, 9:00am Mondays are for simple chores, reconnecting with the arboretum after the weekend. I zip around to have a look at the Magnolias on which I am running a mulching and watering experiment, trying to figure out the most effective way to keep the trees healthy during this drought. Then I’m off to tend […]

Last Friday was a big day for us at Laurel Hill as we welcomed 80 local horticulture interns for a day of cooperative service at the arboretum. The amount of work that can be produced by 80 young, fit, and hungry gardeners is not unlike that of an Amazonian ant colony clearing its way through […]

Working at a cemetery is both wonderfully melancholy and surprisingly invigorating. Everyday chores— pruning, weeding, watering— take on new meaning when bones are literally everywhere underfoot. The ground is sacred even as the tools are mundane, and isn’t all of life exactly that: a chance to work our mundane tools on sacred grounds? The gardeners […]

I had the time of my life this summer at the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College. The gardens there are superb, truly some of the nicest to grace a campus anywhere. With 12 full-time gardeners caring for the college grounds plus a sizable team working at the arboretum, this is a well-managed space with an […]