by Paula Panich
We are selling our beloved house in Northampton, Massachusetts. The one we said we would never sell. The one that has entered our hearts and will never leave. That one. I clipped from trees and shrubs this morning, gathered the bits and pieces into this pitcher, snapped the photo while standing on a chair. The […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
Faded charcoal sky with streaking light, wet pavement, bracing breeze. This is a corner of the stair from the porch to the front path. On and off rain all day, chasing away several days of early June heat. Light like no other. Like heaven.
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
In Sierra Madre, California, they say wistaria. And they think they’re right. For close to a century, Sierra Madre has celebrated their vine, one of the seven horticultural wonders of the world, in March, when it blooms in all its glory. In 1918, during a fundraiser for the American Red Cross, 12,000 people showed up […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
The sky a perfect Mediterranean blue; layered, complex birdsong, dusky fragrance of wild thyme; a big spider lazily scuttling across the narrow village road. I sit in front of the village’s only bar-cafe, closed now at 11:00 a.m. for the day, this being low season, and a Monday. The church bell chimes, once. On the […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
Not sure how it happened, but I have a three-thousand-mile garden. One part is in Northampton, Mass., the other, much smaller and less labored over, is in Los Angeles. Please don’t ask where in Los Angeles — it’s in the city, close to the middle of the city, between downtown and the beach. (People in […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
My amazing, gifted friend, Phyllis Odessey, is horticulture director for a New York City park. But her “park” is really an island, Randall’s Island, and she is in charge of garden-making on a scale most of us can’t imagine. But on her own “plot” — a hundred acres in the wilds of Vermont — she […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
We are restoring the remnants of a 1921 chimney and fireplace here in Los Angeles, near Larchmont. The process is opposite of virtual — real bricks and mortar, hard-working skilled craftsmen and their hard-earned labor. We are looking at one of the most ancient workings of man — building a chimney to contain fire; restoring […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
In January 2002, during a trip to Kyoto to visit Zen Buddhist temple gardens, I fell in love with the shy-blooming (at least in that very cold winter month) lipstick-red camellia. I was stunned by a the sight of a single flower on a simple stone, placed by way of reverence. I had never lived […]
Categories: Place/Gardens