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Highlights from our virtual mailbag. Please email your letters to us, making them as short as possible. We reserve the right to edit them for length and clarity. For safety's sake, they may be published anonymously, but you must send us your name in your email. We're sorry, but we cannot answer all questions we receive.
I, too, have left coins and other objects (a flower, a stone, a small pencil at the Thoreau monument) whenever visiting Sleepy Hollow. In Paris, it was a French (national!) coin I left at the grave of Baudelaire though I did see his grave covered with poems, notes, even photographs.
I support your "French theory" for the simple reason that I
left a Lincoln penny with the Memorial face up in homage to both artist and
President.
We live across the street from Sleepy Hollow and I was thrilled by your article about Daniel Chester French's grave. Why?
1) I never knew DCF designed the Lincoln Memorial
 Gift for Louisa May Alcott's GraveYears ago my twin sister and I left a branch of a flowering rhododendron on Louisa May Alcott's grave. Whenever we visited Author's Ridge, her grave looked so forlorn, with no token of remembrance on it, and we were Little Women fans. Nowadays I have seen flowers left there.
At the time, it meant nothing more but our wanting to honor a hometime author whom we admired. We were too young to connect it with The Flowering of New England which we later studied in English class at CCHS!
Your articles on how the Buttrick Gardens have deteriorated (here and here) were terrific. I have watched and been aware of this decline since about the mid-80's when I used to walk in the gardens very early in the morning during a difficult time in my life. I remember that the gardens were a source of comfort. Their color and the different flowers that came into bloom were always a surprise and a delight. And I found myself drawn to and interested in the ways in which the unseen gardener was caring for them.
One morning I found a small pair of gloves and realized that to my surprise, the gardener was a young woman, whom I met and talked to briefly at some point one day. I don't think she had any help, but tried to make the best use of whatever time she had. She told me there were now volunteers coming to weed, and that she didn't have time to supervise them. And sure enough, in the months that followed, I watched as more of the really lovely plants in the shady areas disappeared because the volunteers had thought they were weeds and pulled them out. Then the weeds began to grow unchecked in the sunny border gardens, and it was apparent that there was no one around, even volunteers, who loved them anymore. I stopped walking in Buttrick then because it was just too sad to watch such a lovely thing disappear. I am surprised that the garden clubs of Concord did not ever raise their voices about what was happening over there. How sad that our government wishes to preserve our knowledge of the events of an American war, but has no interest in letting us all enjoy a heritage garden that was an example of American efforts in times of peace.
I think that Thomas Jefferson's gardens in
Virginia are being replanted. Perhaps someday our government will once again
want to display the Buttrick gardens as they once were. It would be a
Someone spotted a red beetle on my lily plant last Saturday. On Sunday, I picked off about 100 of its larva on my plants and 6 adults, and put them in a can of Chlorox bleach. I looked in the can today, Monday, and they are still alive. I plan on picking more by hand, but hope to try a poison on them.
They are bad bugs and tough to kill if they can survive bleach. Hope everyone keeps combating this pest!
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Double Homage for Only a Penny
I learned from watching what happened in the Buttrick gardens when and how to
cut, divide, and replant iris, among other things. And at some point, I used
what I had learned from watching to revive my own iris at home and was
delighted when what I had learned from the unseen gardener at Buttrick proved
to be useful in my own small non-estate-sized garden. 
worthy
expenditure to do so.