Several years ago, when Mary Berle stumbled upon a single herbaceous peony growing in the far corner of an unused field, it evoked the same joy she felt picking daffodils with her sister as a child. The discovery also got her thinking about how flowers might complement the food and fiber she was already raising at Lila’s Mountain Farm, the 420 acres spanning Great Barrington, Alford, and Egremont she took over tending in October 2020. Legend has it that another local named Mary, who grew up at the once-working dairy farm on Rowe Road, had planted the rugged root on her wedding day in 1983. Berle’s mother Lila, who died in early April, began stewarding the land eight years later and was well aware of its presence. After deciding the surrounding terrain was too rocky to make hay, she mowed around the peony and marveled at its resilience from atop her tractor for more than three decades. In 2021, her daughter started digging holes.
“I didn’t even have a tiller…
