Holly Bellebuono is well known for the informative workshops and walks she leads on the Vineyard, educating people about herbs both native and cultivated, and how to use them in various ways.

Laura Wainwright, previously a teacher and children’s librarian, turned her senses toward the natural world to produce her first book, Home Bird: Four Seasons on Martha’s Vineyard (Vineyard Stories 2012). The book is composed of essays that adopt the voice of a home bird — someone who simply likes to be home and hear all the nuanced noises of what the world has to offer. A home bird appreciates the details that so often go unnoticed in even the smallest, simplest daily activities.

Library Open House

On June 29 from 2 to 5 p.m., the Edgartown library trustees and staff will host an open house to thank the community for approving plans to build a new library facility. On hand will be a special guest of honor: the library’s new director, Jill Hughes, who begins her full-time position on June 25. There will be food, live music and games for kids.

Who says libraries are just about books?

Moonlight Movies

Take a bite out of the sky this weekend, Saturday, June 23, when the Tisbury Business Association, Jawsfest and the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society host an outdoor Moonlight Movies event at Owen Park in Vineyard Haven. The movie is Blue Water, White Death, a 1971 documentary, one of the first of its kind, about the Great White Shark.

The event is part of a campaign called Summer of the Sharks 2012 to promote shark conservation and awareness.

The class is optional. And yet 162 students signed up to take driver’s education at the high school this year, seizing the opportunity to learn the basics of driving at school, at no cost.

This is exactly what Tom and Barbara Furino hoped for.

The high school driver’s education program is part of their quest for teenagers to have the chance to take driver’s education in school. Their passion is rooted in a personal tragedy: in May 2004, their son David, 17, and his friend Kevin Johnson, 16, were killed in a car crash in Katama.

A Dukes County superior court judge Friday denied a change of venue for the upcoming trial of a Vineyard Haven man accused of rape and soliciting the murder of a prosecutor, with the defendant’s lawyer arguing that news coverage of the case would prevent a fair trial.

Monday, June seventh marked 25 years since Henry Beetle Hough, the founder of Sheriff’s Meadow, and for 45 years the editor and publisher of this paper, died at his Edgartown home. From the window of his upstairs study, he had looked out for decades onto Sheriff’s Meadow Pond gleaming in the sun. And most days, until his final months, he and one of his collies would set off mornings through the pine and oak and cedar woods of Sheriff’s Meadow. They would cross the dam separating the pond from John Butler’s Mudhole.

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of June, 1945:

The naming of Martha’s Vineyard remains one of the most fascinating of mysteries, although on the gentler side, and now comes George R. Stewart, in his excellent book, Names On the Land, with a new explanation. He recounts how Gabriel Archer, gentleman, accompanied Gosnold to these waters in 1602, and wrote a story of the voyage in which “the names were like raisins in pudding — man and tasty.” Haps Hill and Hill’s Hap, unfortunately vanished, were of Archer’s coining.

Its beauty is so mysterious, so rare, it stops you in your tracks. The big leaf magnolia, with its expansive white flowers and foot-wide leaves the size of canoe paddles, has captivated visitors to Polly Hill Arboretum for years. Polly Hill grew it from seed and was so awestruck that she named the tree after her husband, Julian Hill.

The wind whistling across the Great Plains of Katama is music to the ears of Lily Walter as she works her one-acre plot at the Farm Institute. A few short miles away in Oak Bluffs, Molly Flam is turning her love of flowers into a business plan. And up in West Tisbury where the summer traffic thins and cows and horses graze by the roadside, Rusty Gordon is striking out on his own as a small grower for the first time in 23 years.