Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
5 Grammys. Not too shabby.
I’d link to their Not Ready to Make Nice performance from last night. But every political blog I’ve visited tonight has it. Besides, it makes me cry every time. But then the Shut up and Sing Trailer makes me cry, too. (Out on Netflix in a week.)
Better to go with a road song …
The warm weather we had up until a couple of weeks ago made me appreciate not just the dead plants I cherish so much for dried arrangements, but also those that hung in and stayed green (or some other living shade, like the Heuchera ‘Amber Wave’, right) up until mid-January or later.
Here are some more pix of plants before we got some snow cover.
Cyclamen coum
Lamium and leaves.
This stem is from a shrubby willow I started from a cutting a couple of years ago. It’s a 6-foot-tall and -wide specimen now, with at least a dozen of the terminal stems flattened and ‘hyper-budded’ like this. Weird.
I asked one of our woody plant people and she said it’s a genetic thing, and that they’re used in dried flower arrangements. I’d also heard from another source that this might also be triggered by stress. It’s along the road and gets a lot of salt, but I don’t know if that would count.
I do plan to see what happens in spring when all those buds break, and also want to see what happens when I root a plant from one of these stems. I’ll keep you posted.
Update: I saw a picture on another blog. Forget the environmental cause. It’s Japanese fantail willow (Salix sachalinensis).
Willow and Solidago stem arrangement.
Gypsy punk is definitely an acquired taste. (If this is too much, try techno-gypsy: Balkan Beat Box.)
Two songs from Gogol Bordello’s latest CD, Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, live on Jools Holland Show. Fun fact: Front man Eugene Hutz starred as the translator in the 2005 flick Everything is Illuminated. The band had a small cameo.
Language warning. Heck, the whole thing is pretty subversive.
Another arrangement from the dead plants I didn’t cut back this fall. It was too big to find a home inside. But it cheers up the otherwise cluttered porch on the way in to the house.
Too cold today to go out and ID all the plants in there. But if you want to know what’s in there, let me know.
This week, I was one of the finalists in a contest over at Crooks and Liars to create a music set including Ricky Lee Jones latest release, falling up. The set is a fall and a rise. Unfortunately, I didn’t win the tickets to her concert. I tried to keep it to music folks might be familiar with. Here’s the set:
