Tarika was among the Madagascar musians featured in a special segment on WVBR’s Nonesuch today.
Month: February 2009
Klinkenborg on gardening
Verlyn is on a roll, with today’s NY Times column, Sow Those Seeds!, praising gardening’s resurgence in tough times.
Growing a vegetable garden isn’t going to balance the budget or replace lost benefits or even begin to make up for the shock of a lost job. But part of the crisis we face is a sense of alienation and powerlessness. You don’t meet many alienated gardeners, unless it’s been a terrible woodchuck year.
Garden blogger bloom day scans
I couldn’t bear to do another somber ‘seeds and twigs’ scan. Needed some color instead. So I went with the African violets and some late-forced bulbs.
I really wasn’t all that excited about the bulb scans. But you can bet that sometime this summer I’ll plop some yellow flowers down on the background.
An alternate take.
As always, thanks for Carol at May Dreams Garden for hosting.
Picturing Eden at the Johnson Museum
If you’re in the neighborhood, get on over to the Johnson Museum before March 22 for the Picturing Eden exhibit. From the Cornell Chronicle:
Featuring more than 150 photographs, the exhibition was organized by the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester. It includes the work of 37 artists from six countries, from well-known photographers Sally Mann, Mike and Doug Starn and Adam Fuss to such emerging artists as Jo Whaley, Alec Soth and Lori Nix.
“While the garden provides us with a place to relax, play, contemplate and restore, it can also be a site of loneliness and despair — a reminder of that original lost innocence,” said Nancy Green, the Johnson Museum’s Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. “The photographers in this exhibition are exploring the notions of the garden as a paradise, serving as nurturer, a vision of exquisite beauty or a powerful force — and our attempt to capture this Eden.”
One of the featured artists is probably my favorite PhotoShopper, Maggie Taylor. (I haven’t been yet, so I don’t know if these works are featured.)
Girl with a Bee Dress
Night Garden
The Patient Gardener
Verlyn Klinkenborg lauds increase in Iowa farms
It’s a short read. Iowa has gained 4,000 farms since 2002, reversing a decades-long trend.
Most are small, and the farmers are younger.
Nationwide, there are some 300,000 new farms since 2002. And the farmers? More diverse than ever, including a higher number of women. This is a genuine source of hope for American agriculture
.