TheMondayGarden.com

Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
December 21, 2003, Issue 91

Tonight's the longest night of the year; tomorrow, to the delight of houseplants, the days start to lengthen. To celebrate this special time, considered holy in many cultures, this issue is dedicated to winter at Stamford's Cove Island.

View From the Autobridge, Blizzard 2002

"The Cove", as we call it, is a cozy-sized island, along the shore of the Long Island Sound. The Sound, itself, was formed at the end of the last Ice Age by a retreating glacier. I don't know exactly when the Cove itself was formed, but Native Americans probably fished here hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. Today, immigrants from every part of the globe, and their descendants, carry on the fishing tradition.

The Monday Garden, January 16, 2005, Issue 147
Eco-gardening at its best

This past week, it was unusually foggy, warm and wet for mid-winter. My mother and I went walking in the part of Stamford, CT, aptly named “Waterside”. The birds were ecstatic to find it 55F instead of 20F; us, too.

picture: a bird-planted juniper bush with a crabapple to the left. Stamford CT January 2005

Where we were walking was a roadway around a man-made inlet off the Long Island Sound. Many years ago, when the inlet had just been excavated, it had been landscaped with junipers, crabapples, pussy willows, and a few larger pines. It was interesting to see what native and alien plants had added themselves to the landscape.

The water had an unusual jade-green cast which was variously explained as an optical effect caused by the fog and the result of excessive run-off from the recent rains.