meadows
A pre-holiday visit with our grandchildren and their parents earlier this month gave me the opportunity to return to one of my favorite Seattle-area attractions: The Bellevue Botanical Garden. Covering 53 acres with long, easy trails and generous, well-tended plant displays, the facility also includes expressive watershapes in a variety of forms. I took an immediate
Writing about droughts and water shortages in his March 2008 On the Level column, Bruce Zaretsky started by observing, ‘This turn of events has made me determined to design landscapes requiring as little water as possible – one consequence being that I now do all I can to avoid using large expanses of
My part of New York hasn’t been hit too hard so far, but it seems these days as though much of the United States is in the throes of a sustained and (in places) severe drought. Even where I am, we’re in what the meteorologists are calling a “moderate” dry spell. This turn of events has made me determined to design landscapes requiring as little water as possible – one consequence being that I now do all I can to avoid using large expanses of
It was an unusual time to be thinking about work, but there I was on a late-August morning, and Peak's Island off the coast of Maine was in glorious summer form. Small enough to walk around in an hour or so, the island is filled with delightful, charming summer cottages - not a "McMansion" in sight. In the early light, my thoughts had been silenced as I savored the beauty of the coastal wetlands and meadows filled with wildflowers, grasses and sedge. I was totally absorbed by the
