the welcome mat is out

After a lifetime spent playing other people, Drew Barrymorehas created a new career—and a home line—based on being herself. 

The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) (SLF) is the latest non-native species to take hold in the U.S. This planthopper is large (about a half-inch long) and originally from several countries in the Far East. It was first found in Pennsylvania in 2014, and active infestations are now established in Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and as of just last week, North Carolina. SLF has not been detected in South Carolina, but it is an insect for which we need to be on the lookout.

WHEN I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT SOMETHING, it’s hard to shut me up. I love plants, and frogs, so I blog about gardening; I love being a sister (well, most days I do), so I blog about that, too.

I PROMISED I WOULDN’T ADD EVEN AN EXTRA TRIP TO THE CURB WITH THE TRASH to my schedule, with all the mowing I have to do, but (big surprise) I layered on a couple of events, and I want to make sure you know about them, in case you are in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires vicinity this summer. Another container-gardening class, a 365-day garden lecture with an extra focus on water gardening and the frogboys, and a tour here in August (that last one you already might know about). Details, details:Sunday July 12, Containing Exuberance, container-gardening workshop, with Bob Hyland at Loomis Creek Nursery, near Hudson, New York, 11 AM to 1 PM, $5.

So I can invite guest experts to join me as well as share the program with other public-radio stations, we’re pre-taping “A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach” to stand alone, instead of airing live as part of my local station’s morning show, which it has been since March 2010.You can listen in to the first such standalone show here, right now. This week’s topic: When to sow what seeds, with guest Dave Whitinger of All Things Plants in Texas. Next time (February 4), the topic is why I’m going to grow calendul

Each of her 150 recipes is delightfully prefaced with what amounts to its provenance: a juicy and sometimes hilarious back story that Clark tells in as simple yet deft a fashion as the style of the dish that follows. I sat right down to chapters like “Better Fried” and “It Tastes Like Chicken” and “My Mother’s Sandwich Theory of Life,” the perfect mix of a good read and a good meal.For me—a flavor-fearing kid who rinsed most of her entrees off at the sink conveniently positioned halfway between the Garland range and the family dinner table—Clark’s childhood tales are positively hair-raising: Summer vacations were spent touring France with her psychiatrist parents, gourmands determined to eat at every Michelin-starred restaurant there. Worse yet (or to Clark, more thrilling): Th

I just call them all fancy-leaf begonias, but they divide into several structural groups:Fibrous-rooted ones have cane-like stems and often wing-like leaves. Rhizomatous types grow from fleshy, caterpillar-like structures inclined to spread over the pot lips or even stand upward. The extra-flashy Rex begonias, which are a little trickier if you get too cool or too hot since they may defoliate in protest, are rhizomatous. I fail with them; my conditions are not to their liking. There are also semi-tuberous and tuberous begonias, with swollen bases, but my collection doesn’t include any

These non-native “ladybugs,” introduced by the Department of Agriculture to help combat certain agricultural pests, have made themselves right at home in America—and in my house, too. In fall, the south-facing side of the exterior can be teeming with patches of them, as they look for places to tuck into and overwinter. The USDA imported lady beetles from Japan as early as 1916 as a beneficial insect, to gobble up unwanted pests on forest and orchard trees, but it was probably later releases, in the late 1970s and early 80s in the Southeast, that took hold. Today, multicolored Asian lady beetles have made themselves completely at home around the United States, easily adapting to regions as diverse as Louisiana, Oregon, and mine in New York State.

IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MEET NEW READERS, which in this digital world often happens when you least expect it–as if someone you barely know plans a surprise party at your house. But the result–unlike that scenario’s–is a lot of fun.

Research from the nearby Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, reveals how acorns initiate a complex series of ecological chain reactions. And not just the obvious ways, like feeding turkeys or chipmunks or deer, but in influencing Gypsy moth outbreaks and tick-borne disease risk, and even the reproductive success of ground-nesting songbirds.Dr. Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist from Cary Institute, helped me understand what–both seen and unseen–is going on with those tiny acorns and their mighty, wide-ranging influences. Read along as you listen to the Oct. 19, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).my q&a on acorns’

I’ve started to compile the 2013 events calendar…and it includes lots of book-related events, too (no walking involved in those!). Lots more workshops and details to be added, but it’s a start…more events, and more walks, to come.To places like Bash Bish Falls, technically in Massachusetts, but a very short way up the road from my house (below), andRoeliff-Jansen Park on the Hillsdale-Copake, New York, border (above). I’ll take my real camera along sometime–these were taken impromptu by me and my friend Jay with our phones.CategoriesNature

September is the new January, says Gretchen, so “Happier at Home” chronicles a series of experiments and adjustments to her life that took place from September to May. (In Gretchen’s smart, not-preachy school of self-improvement, we happily get the summers off apparently!)“To feel more at home at home, I had to know myself, and face myself,” she writes, and her curriculum starts with a hard look at topics like Possessions (the September chapter), Body, Marriage, Parenthood and even Time (that devilish one), among others.  As different as she and I are–Gretchen, a former attorney, is a mother to two small girls, an urban dweller, a wife–I found something thought-provoking in every section of “Happier at Home.”Gretchen doesn’t garden, or want to garden, but on her blog recently she posted this footnote to a story she wrote: She can tell gardening makes me happy, I think. For me, of course, home is everything—because it i