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The Woman Behind Farm Girl Farm

When you meet Laura Meister you begin to understand how Farm Girl Farm got its name. On a recent Monday morning, the 42-year-old filmmaker turned farmer is working in a field of lettuces dressed in a very girly batik skirt and a frilly fuscia camisole.  As a solo farmer who

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Trade Secrets: The Rare Plant & Antiques Fair Turns 10

Trade Secrets is not such a secret anymore. Like a well-tended garden, the rare plant and garden antiques sale grows lusher and more interesting every year, raising ever more money for Women's Support Services, the not-for-profit agency that provides aid to victims of domestic violence in northwestern Connecticut

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Just in Time for Spring, the New, Improved Ward's Nursery

There's always good reason to stop by Ward's Nursery in Great Barrington, perhaps the largest and most ambitious gardener's resource in our district, especially on a Saturday in springtime when the chances of bumping into the nursery's affable founder Don Ward, Jr.

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Garden Sheds: Luxuriating in Nature

Say, "garden shed," and what leaps to this earthbound mind is a humble structure with plenty of hooks and bins to store the arsenal it takes to bend nature to (wo)man's will.  Apparently, that is not at all what Berkshire Botanical Garden trustee Matt Larkin

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Our Favorite Garden Blog Gets A New Look For Its 2nd Birthday

One of the first stories on Rural Intelligence two years ago was about Margaret Roach, the former editorial director of Martha Stewart Living, who had recently moved full time to her longtime weekend house in Copake Falls, NY, and started a website called A Way To Garden.com. Since then

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Prince Charles' Gardener Tells All

Debs Goodenough, Head Gardener to TRH The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall will be the featured speaker at the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Annual Winter Lecture to be held on Saturday at Monument Mountain Regional High School Auditorium in Great Barrington. “We are delighted that Mrs. Goodenough

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Deck the Halls at the Berkshire Botanical Garden Holiday Fair

The Berkshire Botanical Garden has a dedicated group of volunteers who act like elves in Santa's workshop all year long, making handmade things for the Stockbridge center of horticulture. Last summer, they worked with artist Matthew Larkin  of Black Barn Farm to create spectacular wire-and-crystal chandeliers to decorate

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The Must-See Brine Garden's 1st Autumn Open Day

For the first time, The Brine Garden, in Pawling, one of the most exceptional private gardens in our region, will be open in the fall, when colorful leaves and berries highlight its complex structure. This garden is the magnum opus of its creator, Duncan Brine, a professional landscape designer and

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New York Botanical Garden Offers Courses at Bard

Throughout the fall, the New York Botanical Garden will once again offer a selection of its popular gardening and landscape design classes on Saturdays at its satellite center at Bard College.  The inaugural one-day course, Gardening with Ornamental Grasses, is this Saturday.  As pre-registration is essential, our advice is to

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Cedar Heights Orchard in Dutchess County on Open Days Tour

Garden Conservancy Open Days are drawing to a close for the season.  On Saturday, September 13, there is just one in our region, Cedar Heights Orchard, William and Arvia Morris' large property in Rhinebeck, New York. After a major storm twelve years ago, the Morris' created a “wild”

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Hollister House Garden's "Late Season" Plant Sale Plus

Those great sweeps of bright orange day lilies that looked so vibrant and "country" in our garden in July?   Nothing but yellowing foliage and dry stalks now.  The thyme-and-alyssum walk that was the essence of charm just a few weeks ago? Shot-to-seed, and in its present cut-back state,

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A Garden Tour that Takes On The Bigger Picture

There are garden tours and then there is this, the Ancram Preservation Group's Working Landscapes 2009, a tour of eight properties that either are working farms or, if no longer actively working, retain a working-farm aesthetic.  Though there are gardens on all of these properties, the plantings here

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