“The Explanation,” Rene Magritte, 1952. Click image for more about Magritte.
“Reason uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.” – Samuel Butler, Erewhon.
“The Anatomy of Plants,” Nehemiah Grew, 1682. Click image to learn more about Nehemiah Grew.
– Save our small nurseries from the European Commission
“It would be the death of 95 per cent of all nurseries,” said the Dutch nurseryman. He was referring to some legislation proposed by the European Commission, which would make it mandatory for all plant varieties to be supported by a detailed description.
Telegraph
– Acorns: The Inside Story
During World War II Japanese school children collected over one million tons of acorns to help feed the nation as rice and flour supplies dwindled.
Eat The Weeds
– Ricinus communis, Castor Oil plant
Around one million tons of castor beans are processed each year for castor oil production leaving the waste pulp with up to 50,000 tons of ricin in it. And, yet, finding instances of ricin poisoning is not an easy task. So how is it that this exceptionally toxic substance fails to achieve its harmful potential?
The Poison Garden
– Figs and Mulberries, Inside and Out
Figs and mulberries are both gorgeous, sexy fruits, but in very different ways. At first blush a mulberry could be the hot-mess cousin of a blackberry, while figs are classically sensual fruits, like marble nudes teetering on the edge of vulgar.
Soiled & Seeded
– Pawnee Buttes Sand Cherry: the scoop
Pawnee Buttes is quietly becoming “bread and butter” (i.e., a universally grown, serviceable shrub),and yet it has become an emblem of sophisticated xeriscapes and connoisseur’s gardens in our region as well…not many plants can straddle both rather contradictory realms!
Prairiebreak
– Red Tulips, Green Garden
Red tulip flowers have dramatic impact in spring when surrounded by their complementary colour green, and tulips in whatever colour have to be the ultimate complementary plants to add to a perennial meadow and awaken your gardener’s spirits in early, mid and late springtime.
Perennial Meadows
– Karl Foerster’s gardens in Potsdam
The place could be divided in 4 sectors: the nursery, still up and running, the back garden, the sunken garden (front garden) and the house with a part of private garden. The house is actually owned and inhabited by Karl Foerster’s daughter, if I got it right, although I did the math and I guess she ain’t a kid anymore.
AltroVerde
– Seed trade/sale list
This is my current list of seeds I have to trade. I also keep a copy up at Gardenweb during the trading season (roughly, September through December). If you see some varieties you’d like, shoot me an e-mail trade request.
Rob’s Plants
– Short Dictionary of Specific Epithets
Included are epithets referring to structure, form, habit, color, habitat, and other descriptive terms. Still the list is hardly begun after 702 items. I feel some resistance to continue, because you should have no need to discover these meanings if you accept my argument that plant names are just names. What is important is that those names be unique. Unfortunately, it is too much to hope for them to be unchanging.
Tom Clothier
– The Carosello Massafrese
For those of you who are not familiar with what a Carosello is, Carosellos are cucumbers that are are a melon botanically and a cucumber agriculturally. This means that they grow like a melon but taste and are eaten like cucumbers – only better!
The Scientific Gardener
– Kansas Peonies—From Russia with Love
Russian peonies still bloom in Kansas wherever the Mennonites and their descendants settled, towns like “Newton, Hillsboro and Gossel.”
Human Flower Project
– In search of evergreens for Kansas
Kansas is the only state in the Lower 48 that doesn’t have a native pine tree. We’re not the icy-cold tundra of the Upper Midwest, where native pines can take the cold winters, and we’re not the desert Southwest, where native pines can take the hot wind. “We’re both,” said Jason Griffin, director of K-State’s John C. Pair Horticulture Center in Haysville.
Wicihta Eagle
– Northumberlandia
The prone female figure of Northumberlandia shares some of the swoops and surprises of that garden, but is altogether rougher and less refined. She forms the centrepiece of a new, privately funded, but very public, park, and is apparently a quarter of a mile long, with 100ft (30m) high breasts, and a body made from 1.5m tons of rock, soil and clay.
Landscape Lover
– Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit
It turns out that the 21-layers of gossamer-thin fabric in the Apollo spacesuits that kept Armstrong and Aldrin from “the lethal desolation of a lunar vacuum,” as Nicholas de Monchaux puts it in his remarkable book “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo,” was created by the same people who made your grandma’s bra. Playtex.
The Credits
“The Dream,” Henri Rousseau, 1910. Click image for more on Rousseau.
“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” – Bill Vaughn
“Le Jardinier,” Paul Cezanne, c 1886. Click image for more on Cezanne.
My Education of a Gardener 