The Winsted Diner, Where the Food Is Finer
By Colleen Gundlach Tucked sideways next to the Odd Fellows Building, two doors up from the YMCA in Winsted, is a piece of local history that is often overlooked. The hand-carved wooden hot dog man in front is the only reason that a driver traveling through town would have reason to give it a […]
Through The Garden Gate
October By Leslie Watkins ”How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” –John Burroughs Shorter days, colder nights and here is autumn. By day, glorious warm colors blanket the trees and fields. Russets, burgundies and gold mixed with spots of bright scarlet thrill us, but the night comes […]
It’s Only Natural—October 2015
Lichen Communities on Bald-Topped Mountains By Hans M. Carlson Until roughly 13,000 years ago, glaciers scoured and sculpted New England’s hills into the ridges, domes and cliffs we find so familiar today. The melting ice deposited soils in some places, but much of the post-glacial landscape was scraped, barren and rocky. Even in the thinnest […]
Norfolk’s August 2015 Weather
Hard to Complain about the Weather By Russell Russ To define great summer weather most people would say warm and sunny. Since July, we have seen much more than our fair share of warm and sunny. Admittedly, the lack of rainfall has been a problem for some, but there have been no huge wildfires in […]
Botelle Beat—September 2015
Ready for Opening Day By Matthew O’Connell Botelle School is clean, refreshed and ready for the opening of school on Thursday, August 27. Thanks are due to our custodians and to our office staff. In addition, our new entryway and office remodeling project is quickly drawing to a close. We have several new staff […]
Through the Garden Gate
September, Botanical Enlightenment By Leslie Watkins The autumnal equinox, September 23, marks the beginning of fall. The sun sinks lower in the sky, reminding us of shorter days to come. This is the light artists love. With some thoughtful planning gardeners can use light like this to great advantage. One of the first considerations […]
Norfolk’s July 2015 Weather
Pleasant Summer Weather By Russell Russ The month of July can sometimes be a weather record setter for warmth and rainfall. July 2013 was our warmest month on record, and July 2014 was our ninth wettest month on record. This past July was no record setter. In fact, it was considerably below normal for rainfall […]
It’s Only Natural—September 2015
Tree Regeneration in the Working Forest By Hans M. Carlson Recently I asked Jody Bronson, forest manager at Great Mountain Forest, to take me down to the log job we put on last summer. It was a well-planned and well-executed cut, and last year was a good acorn year, so we had hopes that […]
Rebuilding the American Chestnut Tree
Rescuing a Forest Icon By Ruth Melville From Connecticut to Mississippi, along the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio Valley, the American chestnut tree, able to grow as big as 130 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter, once dominated the forest canopy. Although American chestnuts were almost wiped out by disease by 1950, […]
Through the Garden Gate
“All Gardening is Landscape Painting”—Alexander Pope By Leslie Watkins “The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related,” landscape architect Beatrix Farrand wrote in 1907, “except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and perspective to make a composition . . . while the painter has but a flat surface […]
