Giveaway – Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers

  • Post published:10/25/2013
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Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers with amazing photographs by Robert Llewellyn and charming essays by Teri Dunn Chace, is a beautiful companion to the stunning Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees  which also features Robert Llewellyn's unique photographic process.  The book, and a gorgeous 16 x 24 gallery quality print to celebrate the release of this book by Timber Press is being given away to some flower lover.  All you have to do is click…

Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

  • Post published:10/12/2013
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When I began reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, the famous author of the autobiographical Eat, Pray, Love, I expected a story that would involve  herbal medicine. Instead I got an nineteenth century story that included a highly profitable pharmaceutical business, a passionate botanizing heroine, desire, travels around the world, a charismatic man named Tomorrow Morning and a struggle between science and religion. Like many gardeners I enjoy novels that include a garden, whether in a mystery, or in some…

Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison

  • Post published:09/14/2013
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Deborah Madison is well known as a chef, and queen of vegetables. In Vegetable Literacy (Ten Speed Press $40) her new cookbook, I learned she had never been much of a gardener until her mid-thirties. I have always said that a walk down the garden path is a walk into the fields of history, literature, myth and science. In the beautifully illustrated Vegetable Literacy, Madison takes us along on her journey from the kitchen into the vegetable garden,…

Gardening with Free Range Chickens for Dummies

  • Post published:09/07/2013
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Dogs and cats are so 20th century. Chickens are the new trend in ‘pets.’ They are colorful, cheerful, easy to care for, and productive. Think of all those fresh eggs! Dogs only give you sticks you have thrown for them to bring back. OK, sometimes they bring you the newspaper, too. Cats are too independent to bring you anything. Of course, chickens have different needs than a dog or cat if you are going to include them in…

Let’s Eat the Invasive Species

  • Post published:08/27/2013
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'How (and why) to Eat Invasive Species by chef Bun Lai in the new issue of Scientific American proposes an answer to the economic damage ($120 billion a year) that invasive species cause. Eat them. Eat the wild boar, the lionfish and Japanese knotweed. Turn them into thin-sliced hot meat drizzled with ginger, garlic,roasted sesame and sauvignon blanc soy sauce, or thinly sliced raw lionfish sprinkled with lime juice, seven kinds of crushed peppers, roasted seaweed flakes, toasted sesame seeds…

T is for Thoreau on the A to Z Challenge.

  • Post published:04/23/2013
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  T is for Thoreau, author of Walden and many many journals in which "[he omitted] the unusual - the hurricanes and earthquakes - and described  the common."  He had always recorded the weather and the natural scene in a sporadic and fragmented way, but in July of 1852 he declared a year of observation, a 'year' that lasted through 1861.  Amidst the the poetry of his prose, and his record of his own responses to the world, he began a careful…

S is for Sustainability on Earth Day 2013

  • Post published:04/22/2013
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S is for Sustainability this Earth Day. Yesterday I introduced Tom Benjamin who designs sustainable, low maintenace landscapes to an attentive audience at our local 'Little e' (not the Big Eastern Exposition in Springfield) where the theme was saving energy.  The topic was Reduce Your Lawn and Increase Your Leisure. Since I have been writing about low-mow landscapes I was interested to hear how Tom calculated the benefits. There are many. The first benefit, according to my husband, is…

P is for Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden

  • Post published:04/18/2013
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  P is for the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden. I last visited this garden in November of 2009 when there was still plenty of bloom on view although you wouldn't know it from this photo of the view from the entry to the Gazebo where Awakening roses twine around the beautiful iron framework. I had gone to meet Peter Kukielski, self-taught rosarian, and the then curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden,…

J is for Juniper – Revealed in The Drunken Botanist

  • Post published:04/11/2013
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J is for Juniper which is essential for the making of gin. Read all in The Drunken Botanist. Author Amy Stewart, author of of other tell-all tales of plants and insects, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities, and Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects recently published her new book The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Make the World's Great Drinks. Her description of juniper includes a kind…

G is for Gardening Projects for Kids on A to Z Challenge

  • Post published:04/08/2013
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G is for Garden Projects for Kids: 101 ways to get kids outside, dirty, and having fun by Whitney Cohen and John Fisher of LIfe Lab in Santa Cruz, California. Surely, my regular readers would not expect me to get through a whole month of posts without including a book or two. And this book from Timber Press is a doozy.  Garden Project for Kids is not only about growing veggies, but about other designing the garden so…