Hollywood always gets gardens wrong (I’m talking to you, Maze Runner)

September 25, 2014

...growing on the trellis? Cloth ivy fronds, my friends. Cloth ivy. The sort used to festoon wedding tables, or is sometimes found creeping dustily along the molding in B&Bs. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to offer a pack of hungry teenage boys a bowl of cooked ivy, much less fake ivy. Now, of course, the intended audience, teenage girls, are NOT looking at the ivy as the hot boy leads discuss their survival problems in the garden. They...

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I Canceled the New York Times

Mr. Homegrown

November 18, 2019

Thoughtstylings

11 Comments

...Times’s chief competitor the New-York Daily Tribune. That these old papers used to also cover Mars canals and underground lizard people points to a playfulness and a greater respect for readers who knew these stories were made up and who had no illusions about the objectivity of newspaper writing. Of course many things can be known through the tools of science and specialized expertise, but most aspects of what it means to be human, such as politi...

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We are all gardeners

Mrs. Homegrown

April 2, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Thoughtstylings

13 Comments

...ters as it does in those about child development. The phrase is also often used in permacultural circles, where — by oral tradition, at least — it is attributed to Bill Mollison, though after a solid half hour of searching I haven’t been able to find a citation of him saying this in print. In permacultural terms, to say we are all gardeners means simply that everything we do influences our environment. Whether we will it or not, our daily decision...

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Our new front yard, part 2: theory

Mrs. Homegrown

November 13, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

12 Comments

...picturesque trees– an aesthetic that has shaped what we think parks and suburban yards should look like–no matter where we live. Some people think this bias may even go back to our earliest ancestral memories–to the savannas, where we liked long, clear views so we could spot both dangers and opportunities easily–and handy trees to scramble into if we needed to get away from a predator. Whatever the reason, we like open spaces which are easily read...

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Our new front yard, part 5: Constructing a meadow community

Mrs. Homegrown

December 2, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

15 Comments

One of the many tracing paper overlays that I used to think through the placement of the plants Okay, I’m back to the series which never ends after a break for flipper fence building, Thanksgiving and a few days nursing a cold. “Constructing a meadow community” translating from Planting in a Post-Wild World, means choosing a bunch of shortish plants which work well together, with an emphasis on grasses. (Well, maybe a little more than that.) I’ll...

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