Made by yours truly at Swarthmore this summer, using cut materials from the gardens.

Years ago, after my paternal grandmother passed away, her few belongings were distributed among her eight children and fifteen grandchildren. She had moved out of her farmhouse many years earlier, leaving it to her youngest son and his wife, who’d taken over the work at her small dairy farm. For years, she’d been living down […]

My Taxonomy class at the Barnes covered fruit this week. All protective casings surrounding seeds are fruit, which means of course that cucumbers, tomatoes, almonds, and pumpkins are fruit, but so are the cute little dandelion parachutes that flutter on a Spring breeze, the rose hip left behind on a tea rose when all the […]

Patience is not an American virtue. We want results, and fast. Patience sounds suspiciously passive; it’s for old ladies who need it with their hip replacement, or for Job, while he waits for G-d to finish off all his relatives. The young and strapping take the bull by the horns and make their own luck. […]

One of the threads I brought home from the excellent NDAL conference (New Directions in the American Landscape) this past week in Bryn Mawr, PA, is the idea of “tending.” Tending makes a lovely counterpoint to both the fantasy of a return to a human-free landscape and the dystopian future of total degradation that keeps […]