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Mushrooms

This is a bumper year for mushrooms. On a short stretch of path in the woods, I spotted six different types. I didn’t pick any or examine them carefully, and without noting the specifics of their gills and stalks, I can’t identify them with certainty. Mushroom identification is tricky in the best of cases, and without being…

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This ditch is always wet. We

Nine Bridges, to Where?

Last week we added two new bridges on the Timelines trail. They aren’t large constructions but both allow us to keep our feet dry. The first bridge, near the end of the avenue of crabapple trees, avoids the ditch at the end of a culvert that goes underneath a road that connects our village of North Hatley…

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The slate under the bench was left over from a previous project.

The Skating Pond, August 2018

Sometimes small changes make a huge difference, or as I wrote last fall, Little Things Mean a Lot.  I was writing then about some small changes I’d made at the Skating Pond at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec. Later in the fall, after I wrote about the changes, I made one more. I added a bench.…

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The Big Meadow

The Middle of August

In the middle of August the garden at Glen Villa is just beginning to emerge from an unusually long dry spell. A few days ago we had rain — buckets of it that washed out our driveway and threw a section of bank into Lake Massawippi. (We repaired the driveway; the lake itself may take care…

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This is how the water meadow looked in 2009 after we first cut a path through it.

The Clearing of the Land

For several years now I’ve been working on a trail that leads through the fields and forests at Glen Villa. Sited along the trail are art installations I’m creating that relate to history, the passage of time and the relationship between art and architecture. I wrote about this for the first time in March 2017.…

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