Skating Pond

The Skating Pond is a wildlife sanctuary dug in a wet area in an old farm field. The pond and its surroundings were inspired by a romantic painting that the artist loved as a child, illustrating how she uses memory to reshape the land. A large flat rock bridges the stream that feeds the pond, echoing in miniature the picture’s humpbacked stone bridge. As in the painting, willows dangle their branches over the water. Ornamental grasses sway in the breeze above a large outcropping of rock while below, a boardwalk curves gently alongside the water. A line of tree trunks of different diameters and heights separates the ornamental grasses from the natural landscape behind them while simultaneously echoing the verticality of the grasses and trees in the surrounding woods. On one side of the pond, a berm that shelters the space from the nearby road is planted with flowering trees and daffodils for spring bloom. A simple bench­—made from planks set atop two round boulders—provides a place to appreciate this site.