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By MICKEY RATHBUN

Although Emily Dickinson is now considered one of America’s greatest poets, during her lifetime she was better known for her horticultural skills, as Dickinson scholar Judith Farr has observed. From a young age Dickinson was fascinated by the natural world. She enjoyed helping her mother in the gardens that she kept both at the Dickinson Homestead and the house the Dickinson family lived in for several years on North Pleasant Street where Ren’s Mobil Station now stands. During her year at Mary Lyon’s Female Seminary (1847-48), now Mount Holyoke College, she studied botany and made an extensive herbarium, a collection of pressed flowers and plants from the local area, that eventually contained more than 400 specimens. A family friend is said to have commented, “Emily had an uncanny knack of making even the frailest growing things flourish.”

By MICKEY RATHBUN

I received the announcement of the Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association (WMMGA)’s spring symposiums earlier this month, when the wind was whipping the falling snow into spiraling towers of white. In early February, it’s hard for the imagination to break through the winter doldrums. Will we ever feel the touch of soft spring breezes or enjoy the sight of green shoots pushing through the cold dark soil? The WMMGA symposiums help us to jostle our gardening passions out of hibernation and into activity, even if only mental.

By MICKEY RATHBUN

It’s not unusual these cold gray days to despair over the appearance of our gardens. It wasn’t so long ago that late-blooming asters and brilliant foliage punctuated the landscape. Now that I’m leaving garden cleanup until spring to help feed and...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

 Amherst officials have repeatedly ignored their duty to comply with the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and Section 106, a federal regulation meant to prevent “adverse effects” to historic buildings to the fullest extent possible. These...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Many gardens go drab this time of year after summer flowers have faded away. But in fields and along roadsides, swaths of native asters add explosions of color to the transitioning landscape, with their golden centered, star-shaped flowers ranging...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Late summer isn’t a pretty time in the garden, at least not in my garden. The recent mini-drought has bleached out what passes for lawn, several large hydrangeas are drooping as they beg me for water, the daylily borders are shriveled and brown....

By MICKEY RATHBUN

It’s August and in my household that means one thing: local tomatoes. For much of the year, our grocery stores offer tomatoes tough enough to endure machine picking followed by days or weeks in cold storage. Even the more expensive, so-called...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

 Reporter Scott Merzbach’s article of July 11 regarding the Jones Library project’s loss of approximately $2 million in historic tax credits due to its continued failure to meet state and federal historic preservation standards missed a critical piece...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Anyone with a passing knowledge of art history is familiar with the acanthus plant, whether they know it or not. The acanthus leaf, broad and serrated, is the decorative motif on the capital of the classical Corinthian column, more ornate than the...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

I recently heard about a practice called Forest Bathing, which involves spending a few hours in a forest, or at least a sheltered patch of trees, and allowing one’s awareness to settle on all the immediate sensory surroundings. Forest Bathing is...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

After long weeks of yearning for gardening weather, we’re suddenly inundated by spring. Endless outdoor chores beg for our attention — composting, mulching, edging, scrubbing birdbaths and, at least in my garden beds, pulling out multitudes of maple...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

The word “herbarium” sounds a bit quaint, even antiquated. We may think of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, which she created during her year at Mount Holyoke in 1847-48. Although she had begun studying plants at age 9 and was helping her mother in the...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Most of us humans assume that other creatures experience the world through their senses of sound, taste, smell and touch, the same way we do. But we couldn’t be more wrong, as science writer Ed Yong explains in his fascinating new book, “An Immense...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

As the calendar page flips to the short but cruel month of February, I suspect that many gardeners, like me, are getting tired of the somber palette of gray and brown.Just in time to rescue us from seasonal ennui, a wonderful documentary, “Painting...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

There’s not a lot going on in my garden, now blanketed under a foot of snow, to inspire this month’s column. So I took a break from dreaming over the spring promise of seed catalogs and went in search of a soul-satisfying poem about the garden in...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

SHUTESBURY — Many of us find ourselves puzzling over what to do with a bare yard, or an outdoor space that doesn’t quite work, or even an established garden that has gone “meh.” We want to make a change, but we’re stuck. We might have too many ideas,...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

I have a big patch of daylilies behind my house. They are a disorganized jumble of plants that were given to me along with others that I’ve bought at plant sales, nurseries and farmers markets. I have never paid much attention to this part of the...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

How does a gardener celebrate the first day of summer? The June solstice was traditionally a time for farmers to mark their calendars for dates to plant and harvest crops. For Peter Schoenberger, the newest member of the Garden Club of Amherst, it’s...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

Some garden sites are more challenging than others. But to say that Randy and Sue Frost’s property poses landscaping challenges is an understatement. They purchased their house, on Coles Meadow Road in Northampton, in 2001, while it was still under...

By MICKEY RATHBUN

In 1966, an American archaeologist named Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski was working on a dig at Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried under ash and pumice during the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. She noticed something unusual going on...