White Flower Farm, Morris

When I was young, long before I knew there was a town called Morris somewhere in that mysterious region of Connecticut far away from the shore, I knew there was a White Flower Farm. That's because their catalogue, full of rows of blooms with fanciful-bordering-on-absurd names, was always floating around my parents' house. I don't know if my mom had ever even ordered anything from White Flower Farm; I suspect not. Still, it kept arriving, unbidden, and whenever I flipped through it, it seemed to convey an unassailable authority: it may not have contained all the world's flowers, but it contained the ones that mattered.

I don't remember when I learned that a physical store was behind the catalogue, or that it was regarded as somewhat of a destination. (47 Yelp reviews!) But years went by between that realization and the moment when, a few days ago, I happened to be passing through Morris and decided to go check it out for myself.

As it happens, White Flower Farm is lovely, though a bit too upscale for my personal taste. (I prefer the more ramshackle, less curated, but more entertaining garden centers that proliferate in eastern Connecticut. Amusingly, since I wrote that post, I have acquired a yard, but still lack any ability or desire to do anything in or to it.)

Like so many Litchfield County destinations, half the attraction is the gorgeous drive that takes you there. You could plan a day based on scenic drives and gardens, combining a trip to White Flower Farm with a visit to Hollister House in neighboring Washington and Topsmead State Forest in Litchfield..

I didn't buy anything at White Flower Farm, though there were some tempting gifts in the little store - and by gifts, I mean the kind you want to buy for yourself. And of course, there were the flowers, displayed in a bucolic setting that was almost - but not quite - as fanciful as those names I remember reading as a child.

Camp Columbia

One amusing trick to play on visitors from afar - or even Connecticut residents who are only familiar with one section of the state - is to tell them you're taking them on a little walk (or a long hike or a short drive) but leave out the fact that the trip is a rambling sentence punctuated by the giant exclamation point of an old stone tower.

They will dutifully stroll or climb or ride along. On the way they will admire the blue sky, the little streams that trickle over mossy rock-beds, the once-majestic fallen trees resting on the forest floor, and the view from this elevated height. And then they will look up, and they will say, "Oh."

This water tower is one of two remaining structures at Camp Columbia State Park/Forest in Morris. (The other is a stone house that has seen better days.)

Camp Columbia was once the summer training grounds of the Engineering School at Columbia College (later Columbia University.) The first group of students came to Connecticut in 1885, staying at a local farm and then a hotel. In 1891 Columbia began leasing land near Bantam Lake and housing students in tents. In 1903 the university purchased the land for their Connecticut summer campus and began constructing buildings here.

The school continued to expand through the 1950s, by which point it offered courses in Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Technology and International Affairs. Perhaps its most important years (or its most surreal, in the context of tiny, tranquil Morris) were 1917-1919, when Columbia students expecting to be commissioned as officers in World War One dug 300 yards of trenches here to train for they type of combat they would face in Europe. (Litchfield County has a history of bringing extra noise to its green hills; during this period at Camp Columbia there were "real as well as dummy gunfire and explosives.")

Now, that noise is long gone. The last students made their way from New York City in 1983, and Columbia sold the land to the Connecticut DEEP in 2000. It became a state park in 2004. Today, as you walk along the trail to the 75-foot stone tower, built in 1942 as a replacement of an earlier wooden structure, all you can hear are a few birds, hiding somewhere watching, and the wind.

Back To December

I was driving home the long way, I mean the really long way, the way you take when you don't want to get lost, exactly, but you're willing to risk it for the chance to see something you've never seen before.

This was not the story-book Connecticut, with towns like wood-cuts; it was too remote for that. This was the Connecticut where you can never quite figure out whether you're heading west or east, where snow coats everything but a strip of black pavement and the most jagged of the peaks of rock that line the roadways, where dustings of white powder fall from branches above and spiral down in little  snow tornadoes. This was that almost fairy-tale Connecticut, where frozen lakes and snow-coated dams with little brick guardhouses that would be iconic anywhere else feel forgotten, unobserved. The Connecticut where you drive ten minutes in the wrong direction due to a road closed for construction and it feels like an hour.

As I drove, the radio was playing. Voices were talking about the Connecticut everyone thinks they know, because it has been almost exactly a year. And I drove through Morris, and I saw this old town hall building, and this old schoolhouse. And I sat for a minute, unable to turn off the story I have spent a year unable to turn off. And then, for just a minute, I left it, and got out into the quiet cold, and stood surrounded by the snow.