66 Square Feet (Plus)

Ascent

2026-06-07T14:21:17.179-04:00

"What are you doing up there!?"

(Then wonders whether he can grab the tuna mousse before I climb down.)

My story about how the terrace garden woke up this year is on Gardenista.

Downeast

2026-05-27T13:37:07.936-04:00

Breakfasts, these days. Or, this week. Above the rising and falling tides of coastal Maine, way up there and over to the east, and not at the cottage that hosted us almost every year since the pandemic roared into our lives in 2020. This time we needed a bigger place so that the Frenchman's mom and sister could join us—Maman-Germaine turned 89 earlier this month and this is a belated celebration. They headed south from Canada, we pointed north from New York City.

Many mornings have begun with the croissants that are baked at Tinder Hearth by people who really, really know what they are doing.

The house is large, old, beautiful, intriguing, has floors that tilt and bedroom windows that shake and rattle in the wind; complicated, interior bug screens that close via a series of hooks, door handles that do not close doors until the seventh, noisy attempt, and a superb layout, sensibility and natural light on the ground floor. This wonderful table. A big blue, enamelled cast iron pot for almost every meal.

There is beautiful glassware, there are many candles with and without shades, and a vast hearth for evening fires. The weather has roared with rain, hooted with fog horns, shone down on us with a summertime blue, and given us time to explore and to be still.

The favorite activity is beach combing, and my mother-in-law inspires me every day with her capacity for curiosity and her spirit of independent adventure. Also her flexibility. That's 89 in the Versailles family.

Postscript:

The view is not bad, either.

Flowers in the house

2026-05-12T16:43:00.002-04:00

May means peonies in buckets at bodegas and corner stores, and I dive right in. I don't drink fancy coffee to go (my Caffe Najjar in the morning is unimprovable), we seldom eat out (the food's quite good at home, too!), but we do buy peonies.

They are luscious, voluptuous, sumptuous. (...ous, ous, ous, -sh -sh -sh, like the swishing of rich satins skirts.)

I choose them in tight bud. Watching them open their cupped and frilled petals over days before they become blowsy and loose—every step is a pleasure.

Their dropped petals might be even better.

And there will be more.

Here we go again

2026-05-08T15:58:00.003-04:00

Evenings are edging permanently outdoors again and are loud with surround-sound robins. Our new mockingbirds (what happened to the old ones?) have learned to fetch their blueberries from a small dish while we have drinks outside but before the table is ready for supper. They outrage the cat, who tells us they would be lovely on toast. The birds, not the berries.

Perennials are reappearing in pots, with asters, agastache and calamintha returning as if Arctic temperatures and feet of snow never happened. Ferns have unfurled. Ramps are leafy beneath them, with foam flower and an unidentified, tiny blue violet. Meadow rue's stems are growing tall.

The wraparound laundry roof is still there, for now, but changes are already afoot. The development of a very large building has been approved, so our remaining days here are almost tangibly numbered.

But, for now, it is spring.

Cherry blossom, indoors and out

2026-04-20T09:42:00.001-04:00

Kanzan cherry blossoms, bought in bud from the corner store (Mr. Kiwi, a bustling hub that never closes), and now open at last. Beyond these walls and windows, the city is dripping with them, their petals chilly today after a very strange week that soared into the nineties before thundering on Friday into a storm and dropping to today's high of just below 50 degrees.

Corner stores. Whenever we think about living somewhere else, we think of the things we don't think about. Like walking around the corner to buy milk at 9pm. Or our favorite bar soap or organic eggs. How is it to get into a car every time you need something? I mean, we have a car, and she is the only thing of value that we own, but she is reserved for Adventure. (Yes, she is a she.)

I posted some of our local ornamental cherry blossoms to Gardenista, photographed over two days.

She who feeds the pigeons

2026-04-05T14:40:00.003-04:00

Spring is arriving, and here I am, clearing my camera's memory stick and filing photos that began in February.

As I walked out of Prospect Park one dark afternoon, I noticed, in the failing winter light, a flurry of pigeon activity at Grand Army Plaza. They flocked around a woman in blue, who was feeding them. She looked down tenderly at the birds when they perched on her coated arm.

Her electric Citibike rental was provisioned with various containers of seeds, and when one was was empty she'd return to her bag in its basket for more supplies. Soon, all the seed was eaten up.

I don't like to skulk around, stealing pictures of people, so before I left I walked up gently and said, They love you! She smiled shyly, hopped back on the bike, and sped away, zipping south on Prospect Park West.

Ramps bring spring

2026-03-28T10:29:00.006-04:00

In leaf-littered deciduous woodlands, and on warm slopes, the ramps are rising. Allium tricoccum, harbinger of a native spring. Often the only green thing on the brown forest floor.

While they can grow wall-to-wall where they are prolific, commercial over-harvesting of wild populations has threatened ramps in some locations. In the wild, I collect a small handful of bulbs, and focus instead on the leaves, a practise I began...Hm. Maybe six years ago?

And I grow them, too, in pots, where they are remarkably resilient, weathering and surviving the brutal freeze-thaw that turns many bulbs to mush.

____________________

Find Me on Instagram

The tiniest garden of all

2026-03-24T12:41:00.000-04:00

There is a block of earth in front of our building. I must measure it. I'm guessing about two feet by three feet? So that's six square feet. Neat. Its southern border is the concrete sidewalk. Some dog owners tend to let their pets linger here as they pass, where their stream of pee hits the plants on the frontline. Their leaves burn. Salt residue in winter, especially the icy one just behind us.

I began planting it years ago. It's the first thing that greets us when we come home, between the townhouse steps and the omnipresent trash, recycling, and compost bins. You need to feel good, arriving at your doorstep.

A tiny agastache from the Gowanus Lowlands Nursery now towers by late summer and is a constant theatre of bees, mostly native. A self-sown white snakeroot (native Ageratina altissima) resembles a shrub, and does its species name proud. I have to cut it back hard to keep the steps to the basement accessible to delivery people who leave parcels there if no one answers the intercoms. It blooms in autumn, for white weeks. The agastache blooms continuously from mid summer to frost.

Sometimes there is fennel, sometimes balloon plant, that southern African milkweed. Tall and skinny, both. There should be native Asclepias verticillata, too, but it hates the dog pee the most.

But this year - last year - I planted bulbs, too. Alliums, liatris, and, in existential panic, tulips. I only plant tulips during Trump presidencies, apparently. The alliums and tulips are up, and I have now removed their sheltering fir branches, remnants of our Christmas tree.

And I plan to squeeze in more. There is about six inches of soil depth nearest the sidewalk (the pee zone). Less towards the rear. Maybe an African basil, because it blooms constantly and bees adore it.

____________

Find my Books

Begone Winter, Welcome Spring!

2026-03-20T11:44:00.002-04:00

It is spring. And here is a gift of quiet hellebores.

And pickled eggs, with a wintercress (Cardamine hirsuta) nest. They are destined for a picnic tomorrow in Prospect Park, and my first plant walk of the year, in the pale sunshine, with the singing of the hundreds of congregating American robins.

Here is our Begone, Winter Menu:

To Eat:

Beet-pickled deviled eggs with field garlic and garlic mustard root

Le grand field garlic aioli - baby carrots, pink chard stems, watermelon radish, Chinese broccoli stems, snap peas and field garlic mayonnaise for dipping

Endive and avocado bites with field garlic

Carrot-spicebush puff pastry vol-au-vents

Cattail pollen garlic biscuits with field garlic butter, juniper ham, and apple-spicebush compôte (from the fizz, below)

Spicebush chocolate truffles

To Drink:

Spicebush apple wild-fermented fizz (no ABV) with forsythia and spicebush ice

Fortified with an optional Calvados shot

_____________

Forage Walks and Picnics

It has begun

2026-03-15T22:04:00.001-04:00

Just yesterday I said that our native spring is weeks away. What was I thinking? Today I saw this beautiful silver maple (Acer saccharinum) in bloom. And red maples have just begun, and I'd forgotten about an American elm tree I passed late in the afternoon, it's tenderly thready tassels shimmying in a cold breeze.

So, you see, it is here.

__________________

Spring Walks and Picnics

Inside

2026-03-14T20:13:00.001-04:00

On the Monday after the late February blizzard (which was Sunday the 22nd into Monday the 23rd), we walked in the woods of Prospect Park, where all the shrubs, and many trees, were bent into taught bows by the heavy, beautiful, relentless snow. Big trees were down.

I beat slender spicebush branches free, watching them snap upright. And I noted broken branches, all around. The next day I went back, armed with sharp Felco pruners, and wading through more snow to clip the broken arms of forsythia while life was still in them. That was over two weeks ago. Now the budded branches are in bloom.

Also, weeks ahead of planted daffodils (some now in bud), corner-store flowers - at $5/bunch - add bright courage to our lives.

Supper for a friend last night meant spring flowers on every surface.

Real, native spring, is weeks away.

The embroidered napkins - made by a friend - seemed appropriate.

Some of supper was also yellow: a lamb shoulder, slow-cooked with saffron and cardamom and bay leaves form our tree, with turmeric rice and raisins, and an avgolemono sauce. A vegetable adobo on the side. An arugula salad singing with ginger. And baked apples for dessert.

___________________

Spring Walks are Here

Sniff this

2026-02-26T19:42:00.000-05:00

The acquisition of windowsill happiness.

Daffodils were being sold in bucketsful on 7th Avenue at Carroll Street, a 30-minute neighborhood walk north from where we live. So I bought a fat sheaf, all in tight bud, as Sunday's arriving blizzard picked up strength. They were really meant for a friends birthday, but we we couldn't get there. Non-emergency traffic was banned, and the subway was scrambled.

So they have been opening, slowly, and are now in peak yellowness. They smell like childhood.

Winter beach

2026-02-17T19:35:00.005-05:00

On a winter whim we drove out to Breezy Point. A summer evening haunt. Quiet water, lots of shorebirds, a wide sky. Stars, as we walk back in the dark. Manhattan to the north, rising above the blocky mass of Sheepshead Bay.

The tide was coming in.

The sun sets much south of west, at this time of year.

We wore down coats and I packed a hot toddy.

There were big-nosed surf scoters on the calm water. And my favorite loons, hunting in a pack of four. A pair of nervous grebes. And many, many dead birds at the high water mark. We have never seen this. Probably avian flu. I could only identify a Canada goose and a brant, and a diving duck, maybe a scaup.

Snow on the dunes, where we sat and sipped and watched the watery world go by.

Bluebirds

2026-02-15T12:47:00.008-05:00

As we were leaving the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey yesterday after a snowy picnic, and a distant owl sighting, and the company of a crowd of very noisy bird photographers (interested only in dramatic owl pictures but not in the other birds around them, apparently), we noticed a small flock of bluebirds beside the road.

No one else was about, and they were hunting. So we waited, and watched.

Stuff, not much, but enough

2026-02-07T14:43:00.002-05:00

Stuff, on a bitterly cold day. It's around minus 10 Celsius. That's the high. The central heating puffs on every hour or so, keeping up.

Table and chairs: Sold to me as Heywood Wakefield by a couple in Alexandria, Virginia. The table turned out to be a good replica, and the chairs are real.

Vase on table. Been with me since then, too. Junk shop in Adams Morgan, D.C.

Jug in window: Wedgwood, a sidewalk find in Windsor Terrace, last year.

Pillows. They come and go. More keep coming. Skinny la Minx covers. The Turkish embroidered ones are gifts from Bevan and Mustafa in Istanbul. I often pack them in layers beneath me when I work on the daybed. They squoosh down and re-fluff beautifully.

Throws and cover on daybed, both by Mungo in South Africa. Cotton, solid, and indestructible.

Schoolchair beside door, acquired in Harlem. Basket on it from a gift shop on 5th Avenue in Park Slope.

Spring flowers from corner stores nearby.

Roasted pears

2026-02-05T15:18:00.002-05:00

I like fruit as dessert, and winter is the best time to roast apples and pears. They fill the house with positive smells. Even better ones, when you add fir sugar and citrus to their cavities.

The whys and hows are in my story for Gardenista:

Winter Comfort: Roasted Pears with Fir Sugar

Wilderness Search and Rescue SOS Fundraiser

2026-02-03T13:24:00.002-05:00

Photo: Donovan O'Neill

In South Africa's beautiful Western Cape Province, home to Cape Town, Table Mountain, hundreds of miles of shoreline and many, many other mountains, Wilderness Search and Rescue will come and get you if you call them. It's your first phone call if something happens to you.

In their words, WSAR is "a collective effort co-ordinated by the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in the Western Cape that co-ordinates, manages and executes the search for, the medical treatment of and the rescue (or the recovery of mortal remains), of persons and/or patients whose health and/or safety is threatened or compromised in a Wilderness Environment (Mountains, Shorelines, Rivers, Kloofs, Non-mountainous wilderness areas, Caves, Deserts, Forests)."

That Wilderness Search and Rescue phone number is 021 937 0300

If you are using a foreign SIM it is +27 21 937 0300

In South Africa, there is no charge for rescue services. Read that again, Americans.

Photo: Adam Griffin

It's summer in Cape Town and WSAR is very, very busy. This is their Instagram account if you'd like to see what they do:

@wsarwesterncape

Screengrab from video by Chris Jacobs

It doesn't matter who you are or how it happens. Maybe you are visiting from Holland and you twist your ankle on an easy and popular tourist hike, are a local who has a heart attack walking a well known route, or a panic attack on a ledge, or get lost in the mist, or stranded because the cable car shut down due to high winds and you didn't realize that Table Mountains is actually a very big mountain, or very cold because the weather changed suddenly, or your squirrel suit adventure goes tragically wrong, or you become dehydrated, or you crash your paraglider.

Or maybe you just slip and fall.

This happened to my friend Don Kirkwood last August when he was on a hike with colleagues to visit a precipitous population of endangered plants. He didn't make it. Wilderness Search and Rescue worked tirelessly in very difficult terrain to locate his him, reach him, assess his condition, inform his wife Rosie, and to get him out, by helicopter.

Last year I made a donation in Don's memory after Rosie, Don's wife and my friend, highlighted their work. I will do that every year on August 26th, the day he fell.

Screengrab from video by Grant Duncan Smith

Right now, WSAR is raising funds for headsets and radios for their chopper pilots. Get this: until recently they have communicated with ground personnel in rescue situations via HAND SIGNALS.

A modest donation in dollars or Euros or Pounds Sterling will translate well to South African Rands (known as ZAR). And of course if you're in SA, you're donating to a superb local resource.

Your donation will make a tangible difference.

Here is the link to donate to their SOS for Life Saving Equipment

Resources:

Wilderness Search and Rescue

Be Prepared

Suppertime

2026-02-01T23:34:00.001-05:00

Warm baguette, wrapped in a napkin. A hot dish of bubbling olive oil, with garlic and melted anchovies. A bowl of raw vegetables for dipping. Bagna cauda, a favorite.

And a cat, watching it all.

The fridge

2026-01-30T12:53:00.008-05:00

This month, on Thursdays, I have been making and delivering a batch of chile (chilli, chili) to a community fridge a mile-and-a-half north of us. A digital friend of many years is doing the same in Baltimore, and her exceptionally organized efforts inspired me.

I make enough for 10 meals. Usually, it's a beef chile, with two different beans and lots of vegetables and aromatics, but yesterday's version was chicken with white beans. The beans start soaking on Wednesday, and I build the stew the next day in the morning.

It wasn't beautiful but it was really delicious (I set aside a small bowl for myself, for lunch - the Frenchman can't do beans, sadly, so it's a treat for me).

Cooking for invisible people is not easy. What can't they eat, what do they need? Where are they from, what speaks to home? Chile - this version is a very mildly spicy bean and meat stew - seemed to cover a lot of bases, in terms of calorie content, nutritional value and possible comfort appeal. Adding the animal protein obviously excludes anyone who doesn't eat meat.

It also has to be something easy to heat, eat and serve. But it still assumes a microwave or hot plate or pot. There are none of those on the street, where people have been freezing to death. I have been pondering sandwiches.

At the fridge yesterday, half the containers left my hands straight into other hands. I was there an hour earlier than usual, and the fridge was empty, aside from a large container of cooked rice. Three containers I actually placed inside, and when I came back after going around the corner to buy some fruit and small yogurts to add, they were gone.

All three customers were in their sixties or seventies, and the last was with two little children who looked no different from all the other little kids out of school in a high-rent neighborhood. "I am feeding seven," she said, and told me where she was from in Europe.

A few months ago I might have described the customers in more detail but we don't live in a time or place where that bodes well for anyone.

Once, the fridge was packed to the rafters, including the freezer section, with meals in covered plastic bowls, all labeled, still warm. A mother and small child were looking at them and she asked him if he preferred chicken or pork. Pork, he said.

Last week, 30 individually wrapped cookies I placed in the pantry section vanished in seven minutes flat (again, I had gone around the corner to get fruit - I don't bring it with me because it's heavy and the chile is also heavy). I have many questions, most are unanswered.

But I can't forget the two men yesterday, who said quietly when I arrived, It is empty. After my first deliveries this month I was worried that the chile would not be eaten and I went back the next day to move the containers it into the freezer for food safety. I needn't have worried. The worry, of course, is far bigger.

The citrus flock

2026-01-28T14:54:00.004-05:00

On these coldest days - the coldest I can remember in my life in New York, and it's been more than half my life - I sometimes stay in the bedroom to work. It's where the sun and the citrus trees are. The Meyer lemon is in bloom.

A new shoot. The word. Shoot. New growth and life, take a picture, and the intent to kill with a thing that is made only for killing.

Shoot. Like, darn, bother, dammit. Oh, shoot.

In my eternal endeavour not to overwater my citrus trees I managed to underwater the Meyer lemon. I only discovered how badly it had been stressed when I pulled the rootball from its pot (in the bedroom, on the floor) about three weeks ago to try and figure out what was wrong. A mass of dead, dry roots about one third of the way down, but the rest healthy. It's a tricky balancing act. I removed the dead roots, added fresh soil mix (a blend of cactus soil and bark chips) and gave it a very good drink, sucking the excess out of the saucer with the usual turkey baster so that there wasn't a flood.

Its leaves have recovered, and are a good, rich green. There's that new shoot and there are hundreds of blossoms. So the bedroom smells wonderful.

The little bergamot tree has been flowering continuously for about six weeks. It won't won't stop. It has big blossoms.

The tree is too small to support all the fruit as it has set, so if they don't abort naturally (which they often do, dropping while green), I'll have to grit my teeth and cut some off. When ripe the skin of the bergamots smell like Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet, a cologne. My father wore it. It's very disconcerting.

I've left many of the calamondin fruit on the tree, because they are pretty, and these are the fattest. But I should collect them soon and make something. Perhaps just salt them again, because I've used up last year's crop.

___________

Find me on Gardenista

Corner store tulips

2026-01-18T22:41:00.001-05:00

Why are they on corners, so often? The all-day, sometimes all-night corner stores. The nearest one, Mr. Kiwi, is open 24/7. Need compostable-bin-bags-organic-milk-or-a-bunch-of-scallions at 1am? How about a fresh cocao fruit (why is the powder cocoa and the fruit cacao)? Or tulips.

Mostly, I buy winter tulips several blocks away. About a half-mile walk. At another corner store, called Food Train. Their tulips usually arrive on Wednesdays or Thursdays and I like them in tight bud, so that they last as long as possible Their latest deal is three bunches for $30, which is more than I want to spend. It's too much. But it's still $10 a bunch if you buy three, which is low. For here. Last year it was two bunches for $20. Now, if you buy just one bunch it's $14.99. Around the corner, it's just $12.99 a bunch but no deal on multiples. Way down 7th Avenue it's also $12.99 and very fresh tulips but cash only.

The minutiae.

My mother used to find it amusing that I knew what everything cost. She didn't know what anything cost.

She would have liked the tulips.

Flars

2026-01-10T19:07:00.004-05:00

They help. In that moment when our glance falls upon them.

We are lucky to have them.

Those toes

2026-01-05T22:32:00.001-05:00

If you open a sweater up, assuming that it is empty of a human and lying flat on a nice, soft surface like a bed, Pirelli will dive right in, disappearing deep into it and curling himself quickly into a ball. This is not the time to put your hand in to stroke him. Not unless you're wearing armor. Or armour.

When he relaxes, about 10 minutes later, he will stretch his feet luxuriously, and allow them to show. You may stroke him now, and he will make a small, extended grunt of contentment, before turning himself upside-down and stretching his legs again and spreading his toes

Growth

2026-01-03T12:39:00.004-05:00

Above: A new branch on the yuzu on December 14th.

The same shoot on December 1st.

A mystery, and a leaping towards the light.

Bergamot blossom

2026-01-02T14:34:00.005-05:00

The small bergamot tree (Citrus bergamia) is blossoming, and has been for a few weeks. Just one flower pumps out enough perfume to fill the room. It's not overwhelming, just there. (In the background are some ripe calamansi fruit.)

You can see the leaves are dusty. Time for a wipe-down.

This tree barely grew last summer on the terrace: user-error, I think. A bit too much water. I have been exceptionally careful with it in the last six months and it seems to be recovering. Blossoms in themselves are not a sign of robust health; even sick trees can bloom. An evolutionary response? "She's killing us, make seed!"

There are already several tiny green fruit set among the drying petals of the older flowers. I will make the tricky decision whether to remove some (so that the tree's energy goes into foliage production).

There are signs of green life, though - four new, tender shoots growing from the trunk. Two were below the graft line (and would reflect whatever the root stock is), though, so I snapped them off, with gritted teeth. The graft line, or union, is where the rootstock and the scion re grafted together, and apparently root stuck suckers can be very vigorous.

Outdoors, everything is frozen. So the greenhouse in the bedroom is very welcome.