The Gardner

My friend, Steve, took me to The Gardner -a Boston mansion of yore festooned with incredible artifacts, whose rooms invite photography yet rules regard it with suspicion due to an embarrassing theft of grand proportions 25 years ago. 

One may use a camera on the first floor, from which these images are taken. The court yard is truly divine. Those tall purple and white flowers belong to the plant Campanula pyramidalis. 

All That Gutters Is Gold

A friend of mine in Boston is in the market for a house. He invited me to see one that he is considering; to give it my critical "fixer's eye." I'll spare you my assessment, but I did name all the plants in the yard -garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, and day lily. 

His broker invited us to the open house of a 1.3 million dollar home on the other side of Dedham. The home had a waterfall that could be turned on or off, rockface inside the house, and so many levels and quarters I hardly knew where I was. But it also had purple loosestrife blooming in the gutters. That, my friends, is a serious plant. And if you're serious about selling your home, I highly recommend weeding the gutters. 

Landscape Into Art

I'll be teaching my summer intensive course Landscape Into Art this week in the perfectly pastoral hills of Bennington College between the Green and Taconic Mountains. As I arrived the breezes whipped up, the temperature about 78 degrees, the skies blue. Tomorrow, eleven students arrive ready to have fun, work hard, and be challenged. It's an intense week. We make art, we read, we challenge each other to try new ideas, to push beyond our limits, and then we eat together.