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.
essay with photos/diagrams: Trails, Trees, and Tomorrow: The Meadow Garden’s Next Chapter (Pandora Young & Kristie Lane Anderson/Longwood Gardens) A lot of money and a lot of labour has gone and is going into this project to protect the 86-acre Longwood Gardens meadow from increasingly severe storms and erosion while also rerouting trails to make accessing the meadow easier for many and adding new plants to increase the meadow’s biodiversity. Some of what they’ve done: planted 1,000 primarily sassafras and sumac trees where bittersweet and non-native honeysuckles proliferated, providing valuable habitat and food sources to a variety of animals as well as outstanding fall color; built turnpikes to reroute water flow; planted 3,700 plants (+ seed) to an area that had been a trail, now rerouted, using native grass species like little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), and yellow prairie grass (Sorghastrum nutans)as well as wood betony (Pedicularis canadensis).
article: Monkshood (Aconitum uncinatum) (Hiker’s Notebook) “[I]t was reportedly used to fatten geese in eastern Europe, as a salad ingredient in Sweden, as a treatment for fever and joint pain in Germany, and as a remedy for the rhematic gout of King Charles IV of Spain. Poisoning was more common, with accounts ranging from killing unwanted people, like ‘the old men of Ceos, when no longer useful to the state’ to poisoning the water supply of enemy states.”
essay: Tea Time: Stinging Nettle (Awkward Botany) “It’s a delicious and nutritious vegetable, even in spite of its horrors.”
short essay: Meetings with plants: perennial cornflower (Andrew Timothy O’Brien/Bramble & Briar) I admire both the flower and its foliage, and even its spready tendency, filling in garden holes with brilliant colour for free, and it’s one of the first perennials up in the spring here and it often blooms again in late summer. Its scientific name is Centaurea montana and some people, like me, call it bachelor button, but be aware that there’s also an annual with that common name.
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