Stone & Petal

On naming a farm, and the slow inheritance of a place.

There is a moment when a place stops being somewhere you visit and becomes somewhere you belong. It isn’t the day you plant the first tree, or even the first harvest. For me, it happened the day we gave the farm a name. Stone & Petal.

We chose it years ago, though for a long time I hardly said it aloud. It felt almost too intimate, as though naming a landscape were an act that should be earned rather than declared. Only later did I understand that we hadn’t named the land at all. The land already had a name — or rather, it already had a memory.

This farm belonged to Stephen’s family and now to him. He grew up wandering these fields; his father did too; his grandparents lived in the farmhouse that still stands at its center, looking across the same meadow and toward the same forest it has watched for generations. The stone walls weren’t built for me, the plum trees weren’t planted by me, and the old oaks were already old before anyone now living was born. When I say we named the farm, what I really mean is that we gave a name to the life we were building inside an older story, a name that arrived naturally because it was already true.

Stephen is a stonemason. His work is measured in decades, sometimes centuries: walls, terraces, and paths fitted from granite and schist until each stone settles into the landscape as though it had always belonged there. At the front of the property runs one of his field walls, so carefully laid it looks less constructed than uncovered. My work is almost the opposite. I grow herbs and flowers, calendula, clary sage, tulsi, chamomile, lavender, peppermint — plants whose entire lives unfold between the last frost of spring and the first frost of autumn, where a season’s work can disappear overnight. Stone and petal, the enduring and the ephemeral. He gives the farm its bones; I give it its seasons; together we keep making a place neither of us could make alone.

The front wall at Stone & Petal, built by Stephen, with our pumpkins welcoming in Autumn.

The farm sits in Cornish, New Hampshire, on the old river plain of the Connecticut. Mount Ascutney rises to the west, and in certain evening light it isn’t difficult to understand why artists began gathering here in the late nineteenth century. This was the landscape of the Cornish Art Colony: Augustus Saint-Gaudens made his home nearby, and painters, sculptors, architects, and writers came for the remarkable light that settles over the broad river valley. Maxfield Parrish painted some of his impossible skies only a few miles from here. Family stories say he used to stop at this farm to buy eggs from Stephen’s grandparents. Some stories become truer by remaining stories; they remind us that places have been quietly collecting human lives long before we notice them.

There is one object on the farm that remembers another landscape entirely. At the front of the gardens sits a turquoise shipping container covered in bees. Not painted with bees.

Painted for them.

Years ago my friend and muralist Sophy Tuttle transformed its steel walls into an enormous honeycomb alive with pollinators. In Florida, where the container first lived, it stood beneath queen palms and tropical milkweed, glowing against the afternoon thunderstorms that rolled in from the Everglades, less a storage container than a landmark, impossible to separate from the gardens around it. When I left Miami and after my divorce, it came north carrying tools, farm equipment, and whatever pieces of one life could still fit inside another.

Today it stands in New Hampshire: Florida bees beneath New Hampshire snow. Every winter they vanish under drifts of white, and every spring they emerge again into forsythia, columbines, and mulberry blossoms instead of coconuts and sea grape. Sometimes I think the shipping container is the most honest thing on the farm. It never pretends it has always belonged here.

It simply keeps participating.

Perhaps belonging has less to do with where something began than with whether it continues showing up.

Container with mural by Sophy Tuttle, on my Miami farm, Moon & Stars.

Summer arrives here slowly, then all at once. The edges of the property become impossible to distinguish from the woods beyond them, where mugwort, mullein, comfrey, blackberry and raspberry brambles, white birch, maple, and towering old oaks gather along the forest edge as though they’ve agreed to guard the boundary between cultivated and wild — the oaks feeding birds and deer and squirrels and people, as they have for generations before us and, if we’re lucky, long after. Wild catnip appears wherever it pleases, yarrow threads itself through the grasses, and old roses have escaped gardens to be feral and fragrant. Wild strawberries hide beneath their leaves until we find them one sweet mouthful at a time, rarely making it as far as the house. Three plum trees bloom in Spring like lacy white and pink frosting on an extravagant tree cake– and the smell is like something you’d follow across a field blindly in search of its origin.

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Clary Sage in bloom this year

Closer to the house the gardens become more intentional, though never especially orderly. A stone footbridge crosses the mint garden, where mint spills over the path and every footstep releases another wave of it. A trellis carries yard-long beans and blue butterfly pea toward the sky, though pokeweed insists on volunteering there anyway, hanging out impossible clusters of purple-black berries. Some autumns I crush those berries across watercolor paper and watch their brilliant magenta become both pigment and record, my fingers stained for days afterward. There is a circle of rhubarb beside the peonies, and an old patch of horseradish at the feet of a hazelnut tree we somehow overlooked for years. By June we have eaten so much asparagus that we surrender to pickling the rest — still working through last season’s jars — right as the garlic scapes arrive, curling into green question marks that inevitably become pesto.

Scapes

Rat tail radishes

The long production beds unfold in ribbons: lavender humming with bees, peppermint cool beneath your hands, lemon balm releasing citrus at the lightest touch, tulsi flowering into clouds of pollinators, clary sage rising shoulder-high like a violet cathedral, calendula scattering little suns through the green. Garlic gives way to tomatoes. Tomatoes to fairytale and warty pumpkins. Pumpkins to autumn. Borage volunteers wherever it wishes, milkweed rises among the lavender, and the monarchs find it without needing directions. And everywhere among the beds stand Stephen’s stones, a black mica boulder, flat-topped, that doubles as a glittering bench to lie on in the sun; a giant of milky quartz anchoring the corner of the front garden. Chamomile dries in baskets, comfrey hangs from the ceiling, calendula waits to become salve and tulsi to become tea. The seasons move quietly from garden into apothecary.

I’ve come to think that naming a farm changes less about the land than about the people who care for it. A nameless property is somewhere you happen to live; a named place asks something back. It asks you to notice the first butterfly on the dill, to remember where the mushrooms emerge after April rains, to accept that the deer and groundhogs will find the sunflower sprouts before you do, to learn that stewardship is less about control than attention.

Morels in Spring

Because attention is another form of love.

Nearly everything we make through plantLust Botanicals begins here: the oils, the tinctures, the salves, the teas. They begin as weather, soil, insects, patience, and time before they become something that fits inside a glass bottle. When someone opens one of those bottles, I hope they are opening more than medicine, that they catch, however briefly, the feeling of this place: the smell of plum blossoms crossing a field, monarchs floating above the milkweed, Stephen’s stone wall warming in the afternoon sun, Florida bees glowing against New Hampshire snow.

A farm where old roots and new ones are learning, season by season, how to grow together.

Stone & Petal Farm is the home ground of plantLust Botanicals. Wander the apothecary →

Visit Stephen at: OvermanOverwall.com