Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

...waters are continually flowing in.” Installing is the hard toil of garden making, placing is its pleasure. I think I’ve spent too much time in the installing and not enough time contemplating the placing. In so doing gardening has become more of a chore than a pleasure. Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. I take this to mean that a garden should express moods and ideas and not be just a collection of...

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Saturday Linkages: Juneteenth

...Oakland mural by Elaine Chu and Marina Perez-Wong. A Juneteenth of Joy and Resistance Joe Lamp’l Rants about Mosquito Spraying Services, and 9 More Things Here’s All the Free Online Stuff You Get With Your L.A. Library Card How to Bribe a Los Angeles Lawmaker Making Jam from Frozen Fruit Ancient receipts I’m Not Wearing a Mask Arizona Public Media: Behind the Mask A Brief History of Listening In on Police Radios...

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Mortise and Tenon Magazine

...ars ago I decided to declutter some of my eclectic interests (goodbye beer making) and focus on upping my carpentry and woodworking skills. Partly, this was out of necessity. Our house needed some work and those skilled with planes and hammers are busy building custom staircases for Barbara Streisand and don’t have the time for a 980 square foot bungalow in the HaFoSaFo district. I took a few classes, subscribed to some woodworking and home buildi...

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I Spent 11 Months Building an Uncomfortable Couch

...houses, somehow just need to get built. Such was the case when he proposed making two reproductions of the obscure Gustav Stickley Divan #165, one for his house and one for ours. The couch dates from the summer of 1900, when Stickley employed, at great expense, the architect Henry W. Wilkerson to design a line he called “The New Furniture.” Wilkerson is probably best known as the architect of one of New York City’s few Arts and Crafts style apartm...

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