Columns

What a happy coincidence! Ten years ago today, I spied The Gardener’s Bed-Book upon the “Recommended Reading” table sponsored by the Michigan Horticultural Therapy Association. Perhaps you’ve never heard of the group, or their annual conference. I hadn’t either until...

The story of the Detroit Urban Railway begins in 1863 during the Civil War. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the city of Detroit and the surrounding suburbs would experience explosive growth until 1930. The population of Detroit was almost doubling every...

I’ve accumulated a fine assortment of candles – fragrant waxes poured into decorative containers. And honeycomb votives for the proper holders. Typically hostess gifts I stow away during the long, glorious days of gardening season, I neglect to resurrect them to cheer...

Every once in a while a picture comes across my desk which catches my eye and piques my curiosity. I immediately recognized Steve Burns and taking a closer look, standing next to him was Betty White. Yes, Betty White, the very same Betty we all know and love. The...

Leave it to a librarian to expand my vocabulary. “Have a great day, look out for the Snowmageddon!” he wrote in an email yesterday morning. Well, considering my childhood – walking almost a mile to elementary school in snowstorms, and rolling snow in our backyard into...

I loved my cowboy boots when I was four. They were black with pointy toes that my dad referred to as “cockroach in a corner killers.” I wore them faithfully until I outgrew them. I clunked around in them just about everywhere. It didn’t matter if they were the...

What does a gardener do for recreation when she can’t dig, plant and prune? She roots deep into her spice cabinet for ingredients. She measures, blends, and bakes until the earth thaws. For instance, Regina’s Apple Cake that found my recipe box in October 1980 on...

It all started in the early fall when my friend Giselle (not her real name) suggested we go to lunch or breakfast once a week, since it was getting colder with no garden to care for and would probably be boring just dusting, bill paying, getting groceries, washing...

Snow fell last November before I seized the opportunity to deadhead my lower, backyard garden – the last on my list of dried stems and seed heads to feed a burn pile. Neither did my mate and I carry our weighty statue of St. Francis of Assisi from his post on the...

The doors open here at the Tri-City Times Monday through Friday at 7:15 every morning. By 7:30 the coffee is brewing and the first of the ‘coffee klatch curmudgeons’ begin showing up. It’s been that way for many years now, a tradition of sorts I suppose. I acquired a...