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It would have been more topical on this Memorial Day to post a picture of the poppies blooming outside the mud room door, but here instead are the peonies in the front yard, all coming in at once. Sadly, the Memorial Day parade was canceled due to inclement weather — which turned out to be, […]

Once again George Cole has met one of our hitherto undetected needs in the form of this late 19th century Tiffany & Co. sardine fork. We are slowly building our collection of obscure silver. Jen has been hard at work digging up the dahlias so they can survive the winter in our basement. The dahlia […]

Jen has created a beautiful and orderly home for the peonies in her secret garden using only mulch, a few rocks, and several hours of backbreaking labor under punishing heat and humidity. She used the same formula to create this garden in front of the cottage. On Friday, we returned from drinks at Chris Rosekrans’s […]

It’s high season for peonies [ed. note: or at least it was before this post spent two weeks in the draft folder]. Here’s a Bowl of Plenty blooming in Jen’s secret garden.

Sarah’s horse for the summer, Sully (formally known as Lanchello), a Dutch gelding, arrived at Southlands Friday morning after an overnight drive from Georgia. By Saturday, Sully had acclimated enough to be ridden. He seems like a fine fellow. In unrelated news, Jen’s secret garden has awakened for spring, with blooms including this fancy Blue […]

These handsome tulips are blooming in front of the cottage. We didn’t plant these, and we don’t always get to see them before they are munched by the deer.

I’m not sure snowdrops count as harbingers of spring, since, as their name suggests, they appear in winter. The bee at center bottom looks promising however. Ring-necked Ducks, on the other hand, are reliable harbingers, appearing on the pond for a couple of weeks each early spring. They came early this year. They were so […]

Flowers tend to bloom, and fruit tends to ripen, all at once. If you miss a weekend or two, you might miss something altogether. This weekend, we had a couple of days of the sort referred to in meteorological circles as stinkeroos. Still, if the fruit is ripe, the jam must be made — and […]

It’s high season for Jen’s ever-expanding collection of peonies. These are the most fragrant of all. A surprising contribution to the beauty of spring flowers: fava beans, whose flowers look like irises. Jen looks after them all.

We are sad to return to New York today after three weeks at the farm. Springtime is all around, well represented by this young cherry tree blooming by the pond. Daffodils are blooming everywhere, and so is our star magnolia (which we refer to as the cameo magnolia because it is very small).