My daughter Abigail got a call this week from a poetry-quoting woman up in Appleby. Because my number was left out of the phonebook this year, Mrs. Connie Fletcher had called her in search of me to talk about flowers. Normally, Abigail does not much like taking my phone calls (only being moderately interested in…

Sometimes life’s necessities can turn into small pleasures. This is true of the necessary gardening task of pruning roses. Now is the time to prune your roses. This time of the year we East Texans are losing the precious little tolerance we have for the winter season. So, getting out into the garden and breathing…

Gardeners and farmers are gamblers at heart. Nothing is really guaranteed. Farmers in the Mid-west spend millions of dollars of seed corn in hopes of a crop in the fall of the year. All manner of things can get in the way- drought, monsoon rains, wind, and pestilence- but each year the farmer plants in…

I love living in East Texas. You and I live much closer to nature than do the city folks up in Dallas/Ft. Worth or down in Houston. The ‘woods’ are just outside our door and all the wild life that goes with them. Songbirds, raccoons, possums, foxes, deer, hawks and eagles can be seen in…