"Willow Green Farm" by Roxana Robinson
http://blog.nrdcactionfund.org/
I've always been a writer. For the last twenty-seven years, I lived in a nineteenth-century farmhouse in northern Westchester County, New York State. Willow Green Farm stands on ten pleasant acres of meadow, orchard, lawn and woodland, and is bordered by 200 wooded acres of Nature Conservancy. In the barn, for ten years, we had horses. In the house, the whole twenty-seven years we had dogs and cats. Elsewhere on the property we had raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, skunks, snakes, turtles and a zillion birds.
It was at Willow Green Farm that I began to garden. It was here that I learned about the process - how slow it is, and how forgiving and generous. How much delight it can give, and how it can grieve you. How it teaches you patience, and close observation, and a practical understanding of the natural world. I started timidly around the back door of the house, changing the beds from a solid mass of dull green hostas to something more varied. I grew bolder, moving out across the lawns and up into the fields, putting in a white border, a summer border and a woodland border. All these gave me joy, but none more than the land itself.
Our farmhouse was old-fashioned, and so was the landscape. The beds were bordered by brick walks, stone walls and split-rail fences, and they held old-fashioned plantings: lilies, roses, iris, phlox. And I gardened in the old-fashioned way, without using toxins: I wanted everything - birds, bees, dragonflies, butterflies and worms - to be as healthy as the plants.
It was at Willow Green Farm, too, that I began to write full-time. My books are about people - I'm mostly a fiction writer - but, surrounded by such an interesting landscape and community, I began to write also about the natural world - the animals, the birds, the plants and the weather. The natural world - beautiful, complex and terrifyingly fragile - became increasingly important to me, making its way further into my work. It became a presence in my fiction as well as non-fiction. How could I not write about something so crucial to peoples' lives? I've always written about emotional weather patterns; I began to include the exterior as well as the interior climate. My most recent novel, Sweetwater, is as much about the natural world as it is about the people who inhabit it, celebrating the great joys of the landscape as well as chronicling its perilous state.