Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
The old computer driving the office scanner was acting funky for one of our grad students the other day. So I had a chance to test it out this afternoon. Worked fine. Just couldn’t decide which I liked best — the one with the cover up and the lights off or the one with my black windbreaker draped over the platen.
One of our faculty in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University is Nina Bassuk. She’s the director of our Urban Horticulture Institute and knows more about how to choose and grow trees in cities than anyone else I know. She co-teaches a woody plant course along with her husband, Peter Trowbridge, who is a faculty member in landscape architecture.
The last few weeks, Nina and Peter’s students have been working on their final class project — installing a new planting along the north side of the Plant Sciences Building, right outside my office window. The new plantings — which feature mostly newer cultivars that are popular in the industry but not found elsewhere on campus — are replacing some old, scarggly yews and will serve as a living lab for future classes.
Lest you despair that youth today aren’t interested in plants, I live on another planet where 20-somethings are passionate about plants. They got a taste of the real world today, when the mulch deliverers dropped the mulch at some distance from where it was needed. There weren’t enough wheelbarrows to do the job. So they grabbed some rubber mats from the construction material lying around from the library renovation, made some twine handles, and races around with the mulch, making short work of it.
Does my heart good to see the joy with which they go about their work.