Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses.
essay: The Ground Layer (Cathy Weston/Goldenrod Garden). Weston’s detailed plans and designs for several largely native garden beds in her 2-acre yard on Cape Cod. This year she’s looking to fill in empty spaces and add lots of new species to her garden, in beds she’s already started. I love this kind of imaginative exercise, and I appreciate that she is transplanting some native species from other parts of her yard rather than installing new plants.
article: Easy Strategies for Adding Native Plants to Your Garden (Nuts for Natives). Similar in some ways to the Ground Layer essay above, this post offers ideas for developing a native plant garden by using keystone plants, layering, converting lawn to garden, using containers, etc.
video: Bill and Oti Favourite Dance to Rapper’s Delight (BBC Strictly Come Dancing 2020). Four years old but I don’t care, it’s happy.
essay(s): Extracts From My Notebooks Part II (Tom Cox/The Villager). Just so you know, I’m probably never not going to link to these posts, there’s so much that amuses me in what he writes. This time: his dad’s tribulations while cat-sitting, the way life is, Christmas celebrating or not, walking in Somerset with an old map, a possibly dead person in a house his parents viewed years ago, some coffee reviews, a raging river — “But late last week, after one particularly insane day of bucketing sky water, the river reached a new level of rage. It was hurling itself through the gap under that bridge, shrieking blue murder, as if the sea, 15 miles away, had killed its entire family and it could think of nothing but revenge. … Next summer, when I sit out there with a book, with trickles and burbles and babbles below me, I will not be able to remember how it felt, just as we can never properly remember how we felt at any time in the past….”
book: Still: The Art of Noticing by Mary Jo Hoffman (Amazon). Due out 1 May 2024, $60, 275 photos, and it looks gorgeous. “Every day (every single day) for over a decade, Mary Jo Hoffman has made a photograph of found nature – no subject too small or too ordinary. For Hoffman, a former aeronautical engineer, this daily ritual cracked open profound revelations about the connectedness of all things, the importance of place, and her own life.” At the Amazon link, you can look inside at 11 pages.
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