About Oh Dirty Feet
“Garden as though you will live forever.”
—Thomas Moore
OH DIRTY FEET is a home on the web for Jeffrey Farrell's monthly gardening column, appearing in the Ashfield News since 2017. The website is organized very simply:
BLOG: Main page blog posts are organized chronologically.
CATEGORIES: One can find all of posts written in any particular month by using monthly category links found on the homepage.
CONTACT: Sign up HERE to receive our email notification when we have posted new content.
ABOUT: Information about the website and Jeffrey.
PAGES: Special rotating highlighted pages - currently Emily Dickinson & Hanami - of articles of general interest.
VIDEO: A page devoted to the occasional upload of garden videos.
PHOTOGRAPHY: All photos on site are Jeffrey's unless otherwise noted. Select posts include photographs by Veronica Tyson-Strait, a landscape and garden designer, horticulturist, and fine artist. She lives and works in New York City. Find her here: Blog: http://veronicatsgardens.blogspot.com and Instagram: vscapes.
About Jeffrey
Gardens are places where I have felt joy, comfort, and amazement since I was a young child. For over forty years I have lived and gardened in the hills of western Massachusetts. Plants are our literal connections to our planet. The entire botanical world is rewarding; the cultivated garden as well as the wildness in the woods, fields, and bogs.
After years of reading about gardens and the natural world, I decided to attempt writing. My local monthly newspaper, the Ashfield News, was without a garden column so I volunteered and have submitted my thoughts since February 2017. I have taken great pleasure in sharing my experiences, as well as exploring botany from a historical perspective.
.jpg)
I admire and am inspired by others. Foremost on my list is Vita Sackville-West. My first article started with a quote by her, which I ascribed to Saint Vita of Sissinghurst. Her weekly columns for the London Observer from 1947 to 1961 were personable, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and down-to-earth. Her garden at Sissinghurst Castle is a masterpiece created in the ruins of an Elizabethan castle.
Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck wrote, both as a team and separately, scholarly, passionate words. Their Vermont plantings were five acres of wonder.
Dan Hinckley owned Heronswood Nursery in Washington state and is a renowned plant explorer. His books about traveling the planet in search of newness are remarkable. I first encountered his writings, informative and humorous, in Heronswood catalogs.
Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman were geniuses with language. Emily’s exquisitely haunting poetry and letters spoke of the natural world as a refuge and a wonder. Walt included us humans in a wider perspective of life. We are no more noble than the worms in the soil, under the leaves of grass, under my dirty feet."
Photo Credit: Jeffrey's Garden, Veronica Tyson-Strait