Daffodils

William Wordsworth might be the English writer most immediately associated with daffodils, but his sister Dorothy is the one who captured the spirit of this year’s daffodils, striving to hold their heads up against wind, rain, and yesterday evening, sleet: I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about

Daffodils

Finally!

The weather’s nice enough to start clearing out our beds. IButt’s been a long, chilly, frustrating spring. But there’s nothing like a crocus to remind you that you still don’t miss the city. Then again, you should not forget Florence White’s sage warning in Flowers as Food: Receipts and Lore from Many Sources. (My copy

Finally!

What They Read at Byrdcliffe: Jessie L. Weston’s Legends of the Wagner Dramas and Tristan and Iseult

Jessie L. Weston is now best known for her seminal study From Ritual to Romance, in which she argues that the entire mythos of the Holy Grail is in fact a coded memory of Celtic pagan rituals. Her theory, although largely discredited by academic Arthurian scholars, remains influential to this day. The Byrdcliffe Library contains

What They Read at Byrdcliffe: Jessie L. Weston’s Legends of the Wagner Dramas and Tristan and Iseult

What They Read at Byrdcliffe: Noll and the Fairies by Hervey White

Hervey White is not a man you’d be inclined to trust as a children’s book author. Instead, he was a true maverick, long before founding a colony that bore that name. Although White was one of the original founders of Byrdcliffe, his Maverick Colony broke free almost immediately, in 1905. The name Maverick was derived

What They Read at Byrdcliffe: Noll and the Fairies by Hervey White

What They May Have Read at Byrdcliffe — Mystery Edition

I took a brief detour from transcribing the Byrdcliffe Library’s card catalogue entries to search the Colony’s Guest Register for the names of writers visiting Byrdclffe, in support of an upcoming exhibition sponsored by the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. As is so often the case when researching old libraries and old archives, I stumbled into a

What They May Have Read at Byrdcliffe — Mystery Edition

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