One thing’s for sure: There’s weather here. Enfolded in the bright white clouds that scud like sails across the sky, casting shadows over Lake Champlain. In the heavy sunlight penetrating this year’s peonies, burnishing them from within. And in the rain that’s been pelting nonstop as we edge our way north past Burlington, Vermont, on […]
Annie Graves
Project: From fish pond to tabletop gathering place When Richard Paul and his wife, Martha, bought their 1780 property in Pomfret, Connecticut, in 1995, the backyard was a wild and tangled place. “We knew there was a sunken garden in there,” Richard says, “but it was filled with trees.” Intensive bushwhacking uncovered matching oval goldfish […]
Connecticut
The Sound of Spring on the Connecticut Shoreline
Time stands still in all the best places, but only for so long. As spring melts into Long Island Sound, the villages along the Connecticut shoreline stir and stretch, sloughing off winter’s crust. Midway along the coast, snow lets go of the edges of Hammonasset Beach, and before you know it, town greens up and […]
The president’s house at Unity College is no grand Georgian manor in the New England tradition. The walls are bare of ivy, and the portico, such as it is, shades the entrance with corrugated polycarbonate panels and trains morning-glory vines along its vertical wires. Up above, a blaze of solar panels tilt skyward. They encase […]
Lighting is everything when it comes to aging movie stars; no less so when it comes to this handsome brick edifice possibly past its prime. The Wilton Town Hall Theatre, carved into a steep hillside in the center of Wilton, New Hampshire, was young when vaudeville came knocking. The interior of the dusky town hall […]
New Haven, Connecticut, is complex the way wines from the south of France can be. Just when you think you’ve zeroed in on one flavor, another note kicks in. With wine, it’s pretty standard to start rambling on about terroir—that crazy alchemical combustion of air, earth, and weather. But it still doesn’t entirely explain the […]
Massachusetts
Light on Newburyport, Massachusetts
Someone should do a guesstimate of the number of bricks in coastal downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts. Between the sublime curve of buildings at the bottom of State Street, the dizzying triangle of Market Square, and the narrow alleyways stealing off like the Artful Dodger, it’s a boggling convergence of mortar, brick, and seaport quaintness. In fact, […]
New England
The Encyclopedia of Fall: F is for Fungi
Foraging–the fine art of scouring the countryside in search of edibles–predates the ubiquitous farm-to-table movement by at least two million years. Even today, it’s not a bad skill to master, and certainly in New England it’s hard to imagine anything more inherently Yankee: free-ranging off the land (or free anything, for that matter) plus tasty […]
For a little taste of southern France in northern New England, the Burlington Farmers’ Market on Saturday is the ne plus ultra. Translation: fairly unbeatable. Vendors crowd Burlington’s City Hall Park and spill onto Saint Paul Street, which is closed to traffic during the market, making the experience even friendlier for the throngs of shoppers, […]
Vermont
Champlain Islands, Vermont
The largest freshwater Lake in the East holds a scattering of islands strung together like fish on a line, generously strewn with some of the prettiest farms and fields in New England. The Lake Champlain Islands in Vermont rise out of the mist like Atlantean remnants, with views to the horizon, and roads with names like […]
A couple remakes a ho-hum 1980s home into a cozy country-living cottage.
Magazine
Inside South County’s History
Within earshot of the surf along Narragansett Town Beach sits a burnished little gem of a museum that dunks you into the lives of the farmers and fishermen of a coastal Rhode Island community. South County Museum, under the lively direction of Jim Crothers (a theater professor at the University of Rhode Island), trots out […]