Browse Topics

The Predator’s Garden

Until I started a garden, I never considered deer predators simply because I did not consider plants prey. As a transplanted city dweller, I imagined that sighting a deer from my living-room window was the blessing of a rural lifestyle.

My Winter Wood

Care Instructions

The Sentient Garden

The more I learn about my garden, the less objective I feel about it. Now that I can rattle off the Latin names and vital statistics of so many of my landscape plants, you might think I would regard them as botanical specimens, each possessed of a unique genetic recipe and species-specific traits. Call me sentimental: I think of them as friends.

The Rain Maker

When my father was young, he loved his vegetable garden. He had reconstituted the soil from the bedrock up with lime, manure, and peat moss.

Walking In Tierra Del Fuego

Finally it occurred to me that the landscapes looked unfamiliar because in 1920 there were no trees. The forested hillsides and lake shores I’d believed to be ancient sanctuaries of wild beauty had been stripped bare only twenty years before my birth.

Garden Secrets

I believe gardening grows on you in your thirties partly because it usually takes that long to acquire land to care for, but mostly because it takes three decades to let the land care for you.

A Burden Of Violets

All the men concentrated on the distant stripper as if that were where the action was, but I figured her bumps and grinds weren’t worth a drop in the bucket compared to the swelling in unison, the mass erections, of her all-male audience. It was a vision of group genitalia that struck me with a pang of beauty — what I feel when I think of the first green shoots of spring.

Deep Blue Flower

Banana Hymn

You were ready to don the handcuffs, leg chains, and orange, ill-fitting jumpsuit required of all prisoners in transit. But you didn’t really want to go to your dad’s funeral. That’s what you’d told the man a few weeks before his bone cancer finally killed him.