Flora

LENOX - One-act plays, even by an acknowledged master, can be a tricky sell. So Shakespeare & Company has cleverly packaged three by Harold Pinter into a single two-hour program, "Pinter's Mirror. " The three plays - the hourlong "A Slight Ache" (1961), the slighter "Family Voices" (1980), and the even slighter "Victoria Station" (1982) - do have more in common than their one-act structure. The first two were originally written as radio plays, and the third, a conversation between a taxi dispatcher and a recalcitrant driver, might just as well have been.

You know the story: A rundown neighborhood of warehouses with low rents attracts artists and creative types. Soon galleries, bakeries, and boutiques appear, creating a buzz. Then before you can say "gentrify," rents skyrocket and artists are priced out of yet another place to call home. In the 1980s, the South End, with the largest district of Victorian row houses listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States, was being renovated at a rapid pace. Not so the area one block beyond Washington Street where large, brick-and-beam factory buildings, erected 150 years ago to house canneries, piano...

IN SEASON: "This is the first year my son was in public school so we had to go when everyone goes, on February break," Day said. "We usually go out of season , when it's not so crowded and tickets are less. " WINGING IT: "We were going to leave on a Thursday at 8 a.m. Usually we fly to Key West, but it was so expensive that this time we flew into Fort Lauderdale.

Want to look chic this summer? It’s a walk in the park. “This is definitely the season of butterflies,” says local designer Sara Campbell, whose self-named boutiques are blooming with outdoor prints. “After the long winter we had, they look so light and happy” – especially on floaty chiffon and silk dresses. “And our florals are oversized English rose patterns taken from vintage wallpapers.” For more British charm, check out the flowers, birds, and dragonflies flitting about on clothes and accessories at Ted Baker’s Newbury Street store.

'Humble Boy," which the British playwright and actress Charlotte Jones wrote in 2001 for Simon Russell Beale, buzzes with a peculiarly British intoxication with words and ideas. If at times it feels a shade too clever for its own good, the densely playful text nevertheless bustles with emotion and incident as well as carefully elaborated metaphor. It's a busy English garden of a play. Diego Arciniegas, artistic director of the Publick Theatre, directs his company's production at the Boston Center for the Arts with finesse and a carefully tuned ear for the play's rapidly shifting tones: one...

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country By Ken Kalfus HarperCollins, 237 pp., $24.95 We have now, inevitably, entered the season of novels shadowed by 9/11 (I'm guilty of one myself) , and given that event's profound impact upon our society, there's no telling how long the season may last. But it still takes nerve to write a satire based around 9/11: a particular blithe but steely nerve, of which Ken Kalfus is eminently possessed. Kalfus, whose story collection " Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies" took on the vastness of Russia, has, in his new novel, taken on 9/11...

BEST FOR WALKING Nauset Beach stretches 10 miles from Orleans -- where there's a snack bar near the beach entrance and plenty of parking -- to Chatham. Taking a long walk on the ocean side of the Cape is especially nice if you wake early enough to catch the sunrise. On Maine's southern coast, the walk from below Ogunquit Beach to Wells Beach can be a vigorous 5-or-so-mile workout, part of it in soft sand. Get dropped off at Oarweed restaurant and walk along Marginal Way, a cliffside footpath in Ogunquit with dramatic views and fragrant sea roses, and head north toward the 2.5-mile-.long expanse...

What if this review of PBS's remarkable "Little Dorrit" opens with a comparison to ABC's "Lost"? That's like holding an antique fountain pen next to a computer mouse - or is it? Like "Lost," the new five-part Charles Dickens adaptation is built around an intricate, coincidence-filled backstory and a daisy chain of characters with carefully chosen names (Kate Austen, meet Edmund Sparkler). Across eight rich hours, this new "Masterpiece" miniseries sets forth the pieces of a TV puzzle with a narrative sprawl surprisingly similar to "Lost," whose producers, by the...

MINAS GERAIS — We left the house at dawn, climbing a dusty track between limestone crags and stands of ipê trees, their vibrant blossoms forming dazzling clouds of yellow. Up ahead, above a 3,000-foot escarpment, lay the rounded summit of Subida da Senhorita, one of the peaks and open plateaus of the Serra do Espinhaço, which ranges through the state of Minas Gerais in central Brazil. From a rocky promontory, I looked down at the terra cotta-tiled farmhouse at Fazenda Toucan Cipó, its garden of mango, lemon, and tamarind trees opening to...

FORT BRAGG, Calif. - By the time you've driven this far north of San Francisco (more than three hours), the ocean's rhythmic thunder against the cliffs lining Highway 1 has hammered your senses into a state of numb awe. Along the way, you perhaps visited the gorgeous, if touristy, seaside village of Mendocino and sated your palate and your shopping habit. Following the highway a little farther north into this more workaday town, it is easy to miss the entrance to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, although it is right beside the highway.

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK — In a mere day and a half of two weeks of hiking, we ambled through Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.’’ The initial two miles of a 12-mile day in this park along the Appalachian Trail comprised the first movement. It involved an ascent of 5,500-foot Thunderhead Mountain. The summit was enveloped in an impenetrable fog. The obliteration was a blessing because at my toes was the most dense cluster of painted trillium I have ever seen. Glowing in the grayness, this white flower with maroon veins was an exclamation of mountain spring.

MINAS GERAIS — We left the house at dawn, climbing a dusty track between limestone crags and stands of ipê trees, their vibrant blossoms forming dazzling clouds of yellow. Up ahead, above a 3,000-foot escarpment, lay the rounded summit of Subida da Senhorita, one of the peaks and open plateaus of the Serra do Espinhaço, which ranges through the state of Minas Gerais in central Brazil. From a rocky promontory, I looked down at the terra cotta-tiled farmhouse at Fazenda Toucan Cipó, its garden of mango, lemon, and tamarind trees opening...

BARATARIA BAY, La. — Shoots of marsh grass and bushes of mangrove trees are starting to grow back in the bay where just months ago photographers shot startling images of dying pelicans coated in oil from the massive gulf oil spill. More than a dozen scientists interviewed said the marsh here and across the Louisiana coast is healing itself, giving them hope delicate wetlands might weather the worst offshore spill in US history better than they had feared. Some marshland could be lost, but the amount appears to be small compared with what the...

LENOX - One-act plays, even by an acknowledged master, can be a tricky sell. So Shakespeare & Company has cleverly packaged three by Harold Pinter into a single two-hour program, "Pinter's Mirror. " The three plays - the hourlong "A Slight Ache" (1961), the slighter "Family Voices" (1980), and the even slighter "Victoria Station" (1982) - do have more in common than their one-act structure. The first two were originally written as radio plays, and the third, a conversation between a taxi dispatcher and a recalcitrant driver, might just...

'Humble Boy," which the British playwright and actress Charlotte Jones wrote in 2001 for Simon Russell Beale, buzzes with a peculiarly British intoxication with words and ideas. If at times it feels a shade too clever for its own good, the densely playful text nevertheless bustles with emotion and incident as well as carefully elaborated metaphor. It's a busy English garden of a play. Diego Arciniegas, artistic director of the Publick Theatre, directs his company's production at the Boston Center for the Arts with finesse and a carefully tuned ear for the play's...

PROVIDENCE - Think of it as a zoo for plants, where the floral equivalent of African elephants, South American parrots, and Asian monkeys share a vast, sunlit space behind glass. For exotic effect, these plants rival their animal counterparts in the nearby Roger Williams Park Zoo. Towering toward the sky and hunkering around fountain pools, they sport the similar diverse camouflage of jungle and rain forest: fronds and tendrils, spots and stripes, ruffles and colors. The Roger Williams Park Botanical Center, which celebrated its first anniversary in March, houses...

Want to look chic this summer? It’s a walk in the park. “This is definitely the season of butterflies,” says local designer Sara Campbell, whose self-named boutiques are blooming with outdoor prints. “After the long winter we had, they look so light and happy” – especially on floaty chiffon and silk dresses. “And our florals are oversized English rose patterns taken from vintage wallpapers.” For more British charm, check out the flowers, birds, and dragonflies flitting about on clothes and accessories at Ted Baker’s Newbury Street store.

BARATARIA BAY, La. — Shoots of marsh grass and bushes of mangrove trees are starting to grow back in the bay where just months ago photographers shot startling images of dying pelicans coated in oil from the massive gulf oil spill. More than a dozen scientists interviewed said the marsh here and across the Louisiana coast is healing itself, giving them hope delicate wetlands might weather the worst offshore spill in US history better than they had feared. Some marshland could be lost, but the amount appears to be small compared with what the coast loses every year...

FORT BRAGG, Calif. - By the time you've driven this far north of San Francisco (more than three hours), the ocean's rhythmic thunder against the cliffs lining Highway 1 has hammered your senses into a state of numb awe. Along the way, you perhaps visited the gorgeous, if touristy, seaside village of Mendocino and sated your palate and your shopping habit. Following the highway a little farther north into this more workaday town, it is easy to miss the entrance to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, although it is right beside the highway.

IN SEASON: "This is the first year my son was in public school so we had to go when everyone goes, on February break," Day said. "We usually go out of season , when it's not so crowded and tickets are less. " WINGING IT: "We were going to leave on a Thursday at 8 a.m. Usually we fly to Key West, but it was so expensive that this time we flew into Fort Lauderdale.