I want to share a secret with you.  I know a place where chickadees eat right out of your hand.  Not only do the chickadees land on your hand but sometimes nuthatches and tufted titmice join in on the feast.
For the past 18 years, I’ve made an annual visit in the dead of winter when the snow covered ground prevents the birds from finding enough sustenance. Black oil sunflower seeds are their favorite cuisine.    

The perfect time to go is on a sunny cold morning after a snowstorm.  Trudge in on snowshoes and carry lots of seeds in your pockets.  They are ravenous, and you become a human bird feeder as a steady procession of birds land on your hand.  It’s like Logan during the commuter rush on a Friday afternoon.  My nephew Mark lives nearby and visits often.  He once fed 105 birds in two hours.  

Despite the cold, I always take off my gloves so I can feel their little feet on my hands. The nuthatches and titmice feel heavy after a slew of chickadees. Birds, like people, have their own personalities.  Some are bolder than others and will sift through the seeds in my hand to find the perfect one.  Others have to make several flights near me before daring to quickly land, grab a seed, and dart off. I have been taking my grandchildren hereto feed the birds since they were toddlers. Even as tweens, they still love the experience. When the cold seeps in and icicles start to form on our noses, I suggest it’s time to go and get some hot chocolate.  I love it when they plead “Just one more bird.” 
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I’m sure there are other places where people can feed wild birds by hand but the only one I know of is in Topsfield, Massachusetts, at the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. It is about a 2-hour drive from Grantham so requires some time and commitment.  The sanctuary itself is beautiful and offers twelve miles of trails.  The land was molded by glaciers and includes a drumlin and an enormous esker that is fun to hike. A huge rockery sits near the beaver pond. The rockery was built in 1950 and has narrow passages and a cave.  Very cool.  
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To find info on sanctuary, go to
https://www.massaudubon.org/get-outdoors/wildlife-sanctuaries/ipswich-river/about   
 
This blog seems to have a life of its own and has gone off in many directions.  If you know of a special place, please send me a write up to share.  

​​I think I have always known that digging in the dirt is good for your soul, but my soul limped along until I finally let gardening into my life. 

I too was exposed to gardens as a child. I grew up in a suburb of New York City in an old house with a lovely rose garden out back, tended by my mother.  But I never thought it was very interesting – not a place where you could play tag, and the thorns were a deterrent in hide and seek.   I did, however, play the role of a flower in my kindergarten class play. 

Through my adult years while I was going to school and then juggling a career at the National Institutes of Health and parenting two active boys, I can’t remember doing much of anything that would come close to establishing a relationship with plants – unless you count picking up lettuce and broccoli at the grocery store.  At one point, I did try to grow tomatoes in my back yard.  The problem was, we had chosen a back yard filled with trees.  The tomatoes didn’t like that very much.

When we moved to a new house (also with nothing but trees in the back yard) I hired someone to do the landscaping.  I had no confidence in my own ability to know what to plant or how to make plants thrive.  
Maybe we all become our parents when we get old.  While I was struggling to keep the occasional houseplant alive, my parents’ thumbs were green as could be.  Both were affiliated with Dartmouth-Hitchcock and lived in Etna, where they tended gardens with passion and skill. My mother spent hours in a greenhouse attached to her dining room. My father grew veggies and sweet peas.  When my parents moved to Kendal, my mother lovingly nurtured an orchid collection that she ultimately donated to Dartmouth (with one of her orchids displayed in the President’s office). (The picture below is of an orchid I sent her from Hawaii – one of those shoots they sell to tourists.  We were both amazed that it grew!)

I wish I had a picture to illustrate this next story about my mother, but it’s gone missing.  When my husband George and I were courting in our last years of college, he brought me a small geranium plant.  I kept it in my room where it was much admired by visitors until its leaves started to yellow and the original blooms disappeared never to return.  Desperate not to kill George’s gift, I took it to my mother.  Not surprisingly, it thrived under her care.  The problem was, the geranium soon had a companion.  It turned out that one of my visitors had planted a marijuana seed in the pot, and that had also thrived under my mother’s care.  She promptly dispatched the hitchhiker and over the years transformed the tiny geranium into a tree 5 feet tall and covered with blooms.
I think it was my mother’s plant prowess that kept the embers of gardening interest alive for me.  It took moving to Grantham to fan those embers into life. When we established our summer home on Winter Hill in 2010, I started growing things in containers.  Five years later, as a 65th birthday present, we  built a raised garden bed next to our driveway to accommodate the flowers, herbs, and veggies I wanted to grow.  After ignoring the landscaping at our house for many years, I finally began to experiment with new plants in other spaces around our property.
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Currently, I’m retired but still working (unpaid) on issues that captured me during my professional life.  I’m a senior advisor to a scientific organization focused on understanding how the conditions in which people live, work and play affect their health and longevity, and how this helps us understand, and address, the massive differences in health among different groups in our county.  I’ve been running a mentoring program for young scientists, helping with strategic planning, and doing odd jobs for the organization. All this has helped to keep me engaged during the Pandemic, but it also gives me the flexibility to attend to my soul by digging in the dirt.  Joining the Garden Club last summer was inspired by admiration for my wonderful Grantham gardening friends, and an act of faith in myself, that maybe I am a gardener after all.

The final episode in this saga has been my major retirement project. In Wales, the cottage has expanded over the years and in 2003 I took advantage of having builders with machines around to clear out much of the vegetation that had appeared over thirty years of neglect. Now I could design a garden. My plan used the old vegetable garden area which is sunken below the surrounding hillside, and so protected from the constant wind. Shrubs and flowers fill the banks and a lawn is broken up by curved stone walls and a semi-circular vegetable garden. The climate is fairly wet and windy but very mild so that I can grow plants from many different parts of the world, from agapanthus and watsonia, to huge euphorbias – and all my old favorites from gardening in New England. Plants that thrive in Zone 4… or even up to Zone 9 … will grow for me there. Vegetables on the other hand, can be more tricky. Summers are cool and so many squash, eggplant, and even tomatoes, won’t grow fast enough to ripen by the time I leave in the fall. (I do grow tomatoes in a greenhouse.) But reliable and boring brassicas will grow right through the winter.

A final note on gardening on two sides of the Atlantic during a pandemic… This past year, our son and daughter who live in London rushed their families down to the Welsh cottage as soon as a lockdown was threatened.  Four adults and four small girls, aged from 11 to 2.  The “lockdown commune” was very busy, handling virtual schooling, juggling work and children,… and of course, looking after Granny Liz’s garden! There were many gardening projects for the little girls and our son was particularly proud of his seedlings. When we finally made it to Wales in July, we found a few things looked a little different from usual. The lawn was a beautiful wild-flower meadow – and the vegetable garden had been much tended. Their great pride was the crop of lettuces, ready to eat.  Hundreds of seeds had been sown. Dozens of seedlings had germinated.  And every single one had been cherished and planted out – at the same time!  So we arrived to find at least 75 perfect lettuce plants, ready to be eaten immediately!
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​One thing I’ve learned from my various garden moves is a kind of acceptance. Gardens have an ephemeral life of their own.  We can encourage them to cooperate with us for as long as we are there to pay attention to them, but no garden is forever.  Just as our gardens evolve with us, they will evolve after us.  So let’s accept the vagaries of nature and simply enjoy each garden day.

​Meanwhile, we had moved back east, and back to where my American life had begun, to the Upper Valley where Tim was now Headmaster at Kimball Union Academy.  Once again, we were living in a beautiful school-owned house, this time at the top of the hill in Meriden, in a lovely Greek-revival building.  The children were now older (our youngest was 8 when we arrived in 1989) and I was working full-time as Communications Director, as well as doing the standard head’s wife business of entertaining.   My gardening time was very early in the mornings or at weekends.  But with a lovely old stone wall leading up to the front of the house, there were such opportunities for a long perennial border.  How could I resist?  It was a chance to try color patterns, to create a long bed with bloom throughout the seasons.  As our house was again a place for entertaining, I focused flowering times especially on graduation in the spring and the return of students in late summer.  Receptions took place by my garden and I learned to grit my teeth and say nothing when photographers told the graduates and their families to stand in the middle of a flower bed for that perfect picture!

The son of a friend had learned stone-wall building in Scotland, and he created herb beds in a semi-circle by the house.  With an urn in the middle of the radiating beds, I coated the stones with thyme, lined the edges with chives and filled the centers with taller herbs like oregano, parsley and tarragon.  Silver foliage herbs like the curry plant gave variety and the effect was somehow a raised version of a 17th century kitchen garden.  My second New Hampshire garden was definitely more ambitious than my first!
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Fourteen years later we retired to Grantham, where we planned to spend our fall and winter months.  Our plan was to go to Wales for the spring and summer. But somehow there still had to be some garden around our Eastman house – there were so many plants in Meriden that could be divided and brought with us.  A sunny strip down by Mill Pond below the house was the perfect place, so another bed took shape.  And, of course, since then areas nearer the house itself have needed some planting…  Luckily I had found a friend in Cindy Heath who promised to spend a day or two keeping the worst of the weeds at bay when I was abroad.  So I have now become an expert at knowing which plants will thrive in this area, but not take over completely when they are seriously neglected for much of the growing season!