A holiday is always welcome, no matter when it falls. But many of them seem to fall as randomly as the leaves that will soon illustrate for us the meaning of deciduous. New Year’s Day, for example. What business does it have falling in the middle of winter, when nothing is new? And if in winter it must be, why not on the equinox, when the new year really does begin with sunlight’s slow enlargement? Christmas, too. Midwinter seems an unlikely time for the birth of the redeemer of...

With summer on the wane, the sun sets around 7:30 at week’s end, shedding more than a minute of evening sunlight each night. In the morning it’s more of the same, as the sun rises at 6:37 Saturday and almost a minute later each morning. The setting sun reveals three bright objects in its wake: Venus and Mars, and the first-magnitude star Spica, all within five degrees of one another, the field of view of most binoculars. Look to the west immediately after sunset. While closest to...

If you examine a rose plant carefully, you will notice that it has compound leaves, meaning that there are either three or five leaflets to each leaf. The three-leaflet leaves appear near the top and bottom of each stem, and the five-leaflet leaves appear in the middle of the stems. In the axel of each leaf is a vegetative bud; however, the buds are more robust and pronounced in the axels of the five-leaflet leaves than in the three-leaflet leaves. You can control the growth of roses by pruning...

Buddy Holly was a remarkable music innovator; he heard disparate influences and blended them to expand the limits of the newly named rock and roll musical genre. He was so remarkable that his short three-year career and his short 22-year life span are both still being celebrated and appreciated today, 51 years after his death in a plane crash. The comet-like trajectory of Buddy Holly’s life deserves an equally intense and glowing theatrical presentation. I’m sorry to say that Buddy...