Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
From Cool Hand Luke, in memory of Paul Newman:
We used to wail on this back in my church camp days. (We weren’t big on hypocrisy back then, either.) A folk-inspired song written in the ’50s, it’s been covered by a wide variety of artists, including Jack Johnson, the Levellers, the King Earl Boogie Band, the Flaming Lips, the Dead Kennedy and Billy Idol.
If you missed last week’s talk by Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, it was a really good one. It’s now available online.
Louv, chairman of the Children & Nature Network, columnist, & recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal will spoke on Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder as part of the Cornell Plantations lecture series.
Regular readers of the New York Times Home and Garden section probably zeroed in on Anne Raver’s feature on White Flower Farm and the accompanying slideshow.
I sure did. But another story and slideshow (that had nothing to do with plants or gardening) extolling the virtues of blue and white also caught my eye.
Why am I drawn to blue pots, cobalt blue bottles and other blue accessories in the garden? The bottles I can trace back to digging antique bottles out of old dumps I found in the woods. Otherwise, all I can say it it might be the dearth of blue flowers I can actually grow.
Blue bottle decorations
Blue and white container water garden.
Blue cold frame against our blue house.
If this pictorial by Elspeth Thompson in the UK Telegraph doesn’t put you in the mood for ordering and planting bulbs this fall, nothing will. Of course, here in the U.S., our mileage may vary for a few of these. (I don’t expect any daffodil to flower from Christmas to March.) But most all of these would brighten my spring or be a great indoor plant this winter.
I’ve already got half a dozen of these picks myself, including the Thalia daffodil (below), Cyclamen coum and Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.
