Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses. Unless mentioned, all links should be free of paywalls.
list: Top 100 best walking cities 2025 (Guruwalk) I’m getting wanderlust just browsing the list. Many are in Spain, I notice; by my quick count, 26 cities of the total 100, and 4 of the top 20 (Italian cities also took 4 of the top 20 spots). The only one I noticed in the U.S was NYC, which came in at 33rd.
podcast/essay: How the Woolly Devil, Member of a New Plant Genus, Was Discovered on a Hike in Big Bend (Atlas Obscura) 17-min podcast, or you can read the transcript. “On an ordinary walk around Big Bend National Park, a park ranger and volunteer made a rare scientific discovery: an entirely new kind of plant.” As an article linked from this one notes, “The discovery marks both a new species, and the first new genus found in a national park since a yellow-flowered shrub called July gold was discovered in Death Valley back in 1976.”
short video: Closing the Fridge (Renzo Rage/TikTok) Closing the refrigerator door? Try some Tai Chi, Capoeira, Shaolin, WWE, Bullshido, Judo, Wing Chun, or just be a Ninja. Presumably you could apply these techniques to most doors.
photo essay: Pettifers: Lessons in Layering and Color (Karen Chapman/La Jardinet) Pettifers is a private garden in the small Oxfordshire village of Wardington (England). Her two take-home ideas, illustrated with lush photos, are to 1. Use bold drifts of color (bulbs, chives and hardy geraniums and other spreaders, and drifts of grasses and wildflowers; and she specifically mentions the “burgundy blush on the large leaved Rodgersia”) and to 2. Define spaces — courtyard/entry, formal garden, meadow. Even though most of us have much smaller gardens without so many terraces or topiary 😊, there’s inspiration here; for me, it’s the “sweeping drifts of rosy-red geum,” a plant that grows here in NH but that I haven’t used before.
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