The weeds are getting their way in some plots, sagging on best intentions like the muggy Monday air. It’s evening on the opening day of August. “You’d think there would be more people out here taking care of things, but it’s hot and I don’t blame them,” said Sherry. She was among the stalwarts, digging…

Last night, while draping my grape vines with window screening to keep them out of the mouths of deer, I found amid the folds a substantial beetle. It was almost 1.5 inches long, the biggest I’d ever seen outside of captivity. I finished covering the grape vines and went to bed. At dawn, the beetle…

Fred Brandell starts with what looks like a big metal stein, except it has a little chimney on top and a squeezebox stuck on the side. He pops it open, stuffs in a wad of burlap, and lights it. Gray curls rise. He pops it shut and pumps the bellows. “I always like to have…

It’s early on a Wednesday morning at Arlington House. The rising sun slides light through the headstone-studded hillside and into the old kitchen garden. The plot that once fed Confederate General Robert E. Lee is undergoing a revival. At the helm is Sandy Newton. She and a friend started volunteering about six years ago to…

The chill and misty gray sky made it a perfect Saturday morning to stay in neutral, let the bed keep its hold for a little longer. Hardy Park still needed tidying up, and enthusiasts from the surrounding Foxhall Community slipped themselves into drive on April 30, 2016 to get the work done as planned. They…

Whatever becomes of the politics of Egypt’s “Arab Spring,” the future of the country’s blooms certainly appears bright, colorful and clear. Really clear. So it seems through the eye of Amr Mounib, whose compelling flower photographs from Egypt are on exhibit at The Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al-Quds in Washington, D.C., located at 2425 Virginia Ave.,…