June 2007 – Page 4 – Ellis Hollow

Early June picture purge

I’ve still got pictures to purge from late May and some other pent up posts. (So much to blog about, so little time.) Will catch up on words some other evening. Click images for larger view.

Nectoscordum flowers. They’re interesting but rather plain until you look at them closely. Then they’re pretty wild.

First peony I ever grew from seed. Possibly a P. tenufolia? Wrenched my back taking this shot.

Form and texture out front. Tradescantia, umbrella plant, siberian iris, columbine, evening primrose, and more.

A polite euphorbia that I got from my friend Mary. I went back and looked it up. Pretty sure it’s Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’.

I like the stems and leaves of the euphorbia as much as the flowers. Nectoscordum with fading allium in background.

Asian primrose, though the name escapes me now.

Peonies ready to pop. Sometimes buds beat blooms.

Yellow flag iris in the water garden.

Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?

Venus Kallipygos Much discussion of sex and antiquities over at GardenRant this week.

Hank comments “Everything is sex. Either overt or covert. All sex. All the time.” (What, you can’t liveblog from Sweden Hank? They have ‘the internets’ over there I think. Or did you run into the Swedish Bikini Team?)

IfÂ IÂ couldÂ affordÂ it,Â I would buy classic statuary for my (less than formal) garden. But when I see Venus Kallipygos, I don’t feel a connection with the ancients based on sex. All I can hear is the most feared question a man is ever asked:

Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?

You can buy classic statues if you’ve got the bucks. (Page down. I have no clue why the golfer sorts to the top of that gallery. Ironic.) No thanks. I’mÂ stuckÂ withÂ a pink flamingo (theÂ kindÂ with the spinning wings) and a bowling ball on a piece of rebar.

saronged statuary I was searching for some images of the tacky modern nude garden statue crap that I remember gracing ads in gardening mags. You know the ones — a hybrid of Hustler and Gary Lee Price. Instead, I ran into this USAToday article Garden Center covers nude statues with velvet sarong.

Ummmm… Leave it to a Bible Belt nursery to make classic statues even more erotic in a tacky twins-in-bondage sort of way. (Yes. Sales increased and customers were caughtÂ ~~peaking~~ peeking.) Reminds me of John Ashcroft screening Lady Liberty.

In a perfect world, I’d have sculpture in my garden like what Nicole posted about in More Buddha Park. (She’s got another great slideshow of Asian garden sculpture and much more worth exploring over at her blog, A Carribean Garden.)

Lots more to blog about and lots of pent up pix to purge. But I’ve got to go make hay while the sun shines — or at least it’s not raining.

Update: Keeping with the classical them, Bill Kirchen (formerly of Commander Cody) is coming to town. His latest is ‘Hammer of the Honky Tonk Gods’ — a tribute to a Fender or one of those other classic guitars. I’m clueless, but I get his point:

It was born at the junction
Or form and function
It’s the hammer of the honky tonk gods.

Here’s a taste.

WaPo on bees/CCD: ‘So long, and thanks for all the fish.’

bee on iris Intriguing article in today’s Washington Post, Honey, I’m Gone: Abandoned Beehives Are a Scientific Mystery and a Metaphor for Our Tenuous Times.

This post’s title references a quote that is also the lede of the article, recalling how in theÂ sci-fi novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the dolphins all disappear just before Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route, leaving behind only that message.

Though I’m not sure I buy it (or a lot of what comes out of WaPo these days), the premise of the article is that how we view Colony Collapse Disorder says more about us than about what’s causing the alarming decline of the bees:

If what you’re searching for is an entire spectrum of moral lessons regarding the evils of human behavior, this crisis is even better than global warming. If you hate globalization, then you will doubtless see its evils as patent in the disappearance of the bees. Pesticides? Genetically modified foods? Those, too, are convenient hypotheses in the absence of contradictory information. Even cellphones have been offered as an explanation. If you’re driven crazy by them, then so must be the bees. Isn’t it obvious?

Our fuzzy, hard-working, sweetness-producing icons have become our most powerful Rorschach test.

As go the bees, so go our hopes and fears for the future.

As for the realities of the problem, there’s not much new here. A USDA scientist jokes about bees making crop circles and tellsÂ us all the things that apparently aren’t to blame. I take some solace in the notion that the problem seems concentrated on those stressed colonies being shipped all over kingdom come on flatbed trailers, the nation’s ‘hardest working migrants’.

It’s a longish article, but worth a read — or at least skip ahead to the end where the author suggests we take solace in seven of our culture’s great exit lines.

I’m going with the (sarcastic) one from the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

Good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.