Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses.
photo essay: A short compost story (in pictures) (Cass Marketos/The Rot). Spoiler: It’s about a zucchini.
long article: What Plants Are Saying About Us: Your brain is not the root of cognition (Amanda Gefter/Nautilus). “As the MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks wrote in a landmark 1991 paper, “Intelligence Without Representation,” ‘Explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model.’ … If cognition is embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, and ecological, then what we call the mind is not in the brain. It is the body’s active engagement with the world, made not of neural firings alone but of sensorimotor loops that run through the brain, body, and environment. In other words, the mind is not in the head. … ‘Cognition is not something that plants—or indeed animals—can possibly have,’ [Paco] Calvo writes in his new book, Planta Sapiens. ‘It is rather something created by the interaction between an organism and its environment.'”
another long article: I Can Feel God’s Presence In This Portable Toilet: Notes on St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah, Georgia, USA (Harrison Scott Key/Bitter Southerner). … “a place that feels like a high-concept VR experience celebrating the zenith of Enlightenment humanism, all those trees, steeples, museums, pocket gardens, Girl Scouts, SCAD students painting en plein air, an outdoor wedding every few blocks. Too perfect to be real, this beneficent fairy kingdom, all shadow and sunbeam, blossom, and gurgle.” (Honestly, just about every line is quotable.)
photo essay: Edible Favorites For Your Cutting Garden (Floret). Some you’ll know — peas, tomatoes, tomatillos, oregano, specific varieties of basil and dill, nasturtiums, calendula, annual bachelor’s buttons, rapsberries, marigolds, pansies (many specific varieties recommended), ornamental squash (again, many varieties named) — and some may be unfamiliar to you, like orach and shiso.
webcam: Black bears (mother and at least two cubs) denning under a house in Pike Co., PA (hdontap)
