[Diniz Borges asked me to provide a few words about my 2026 calendar, “O último calendário eletrónico ~ Uma síntese” (“The final online calendar ~ Summing up”), because each month this year the Filamentos blog is posting that month’s page, along with my brief explanation of its contents.]
On my first full day in the Azores back in 2002, I went walking around Velas, São Jorge. I soon found a retired gentleman tending a block-wide vegetable garden where he raised enough produce for himself, his adult children and their families. Although my conversational Portuguese could charitably be described as sketchy, I managed to chat with my fellow green-thumber about his crops, as well as my own back home in the U.S.
As I continued around town, I noticed that even homes with tight yard space commonly grew at least potatoes, onions and kale [couves], and often a few other vegetables; I discovered this to be typical throughout the Azores. I saw many kinds of tender produce in people’s kitchen gardens that I recalled from native San Francisco Bay Area, too: apricots, passion fruit (which my parents grew, but never harvested), various citrus fruits, globe artichokes, etc.
Years later, at Flores poet Gabriela Silva’s home in Fazenda das Lajes, my husband and I admired her huge kitchen garden, productive even in late winter. Gabriela made us a sumptuous vegetarian lunch featuring homegrown crops, including beets fixed three ways (yum!).
Azorean front yards also abound with many of the same ornamentals I recall from childhood — including bergenia cordifolia, pink false amaryllis [Lycoris squamigera], bird-of-paradise [strelitzia], poinsettia TREES(!) (holiday potted plants long ago transplanted outdoors), agaves, palm trees, dracaenas… and my beloved orange California poppies, the state’s flower, which I suspect were first grown in the Azores using souvenir seeds from the Golden State.
Around the Azores, I was astonished the first time I saw groves of bananas, a commercial pineapple greenhouse, and São Miguel’s two tea plantations (São Jorge later added a coffee plantation). The Azores are also historically renowned for Pico’s wines, made from grapes grown in vineyards enclosed in basalt stone walls. Biscoitos, on Terceira’s north shore, is also noted for its wines.
Other common crops in the Azores are field corn, dried outdoors on burras (pyramidal racks). Hay for livestock is raised in patchwork pastures called curruletas enclosed in basalt stone walls; one of the first sights a tourist landing at Ponta Delgada may see are cylindrical bales in fields between the air strip and the ocean.
The Azores’ mild climate is also conducive to formal botanical gardens. In fact, for as long as I can remember, my parents took me to botanical gardens in my hometown — Tilden, University of California, and the municipal rose garden; as an adult, I devloped a passion for visiting botanical gardens across the U.S. and Canada. The first botanical garden I visited was the dramatic, expansive formal Parque Terra Nostra on São Miguel, originally the private garden on the American Hickling family’s estate in Furnas. Next was the Jardim Duque da Terceira, with its landmark yellow obelisk atop a steep slope in central Angra do Heroísmo. On subsequent visits, I took in the Faial Botanical Garden in Horta, noted for its endemic species, and the Quinta do Martelo [Hammer Farm] just outside Angra, where rural life from centuries past is re-created.
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