Setting annual goals for the garden keeps me on track and helps me avoid jumping from one thing to another, something I’m all too prone to do. Last year I set 10 goals for myself and discovered, looking back in last week’s post, that ten was too many. So in 2017 I’m cutting my ambitions…
Last December I took the risky step of setting goals for 2016. So as that year ends and 2017 begins, it’s time to assess. How much of what I wanted to do did I actually accomplish? 1. The Cascade: As intended, I modified the plantings around The Cascade. I reduced the number of different types of…
For the last sixteen years I’ve kept a record of what happens each year in the garden. I’ve conscientiously photographed each project I’ve undertaken, each border as it changed from season to season, each modification I made or was thinking about making. I’ve stuck these photographs into albums and written comments — about my intentions for a project, or the weather, what I…
On the weekend we installed the granite slab that marks the ‘front door’ of Orin’s Sugarcamp, my latest art installation at Glen Villa. (You can read about the project here.) Doing this was tricky. It involved transporting an 800-pound slab of rock across a snowy field and a partially frozen stream on the back of an open wagon. That takes…
Is less more? I associate the familiar phrase with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the founders of modern architecture and a proponent of simplicity of style. But when I went to confirm this, I found to my surprise that the phrase was first used in print in Andrea del Sarto, a poem by…