Shade Gardening Around our Ping-Pong Arena
The Table Tennis Arena If COVID-19 wasn’t worrisome enough, we dodged tornadoes, scared off black vultures, and survived two nights of hard freezes this month. Gardening and Ping-Pong, [...]
Allen Bush
Kentucky in April: Bloom-Binging Without Precaution
Dead Horse Gap in Prospect, KY. Rose and I are lying low in Salvisa, but we drive to Louisville once a week for grocery shopping at the Dirty [...]
Cloistered by COVID, Thinking of a Trappist Abbey
Library of Congress archival photo. I began dreaming of a walled sanctuary soon after I began gardening in the 1970s. I wondered what it would be like to [...]
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens and Salvador Dalí’s Gardens of the Mind
I visited the beautiful 15-acre Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, last month. This living museum was tricked out like an Easter egg hunt. There were eggs, for [...]
Postcard from Florida
Rose and I left our garden behind last week to go shelling and birding on Sanibel, Captiva and Cayo Costa. We follow a routine, repeated for a week or two [...]
In Hawaii, Snorkeling Past Solstice to Spring
Rose and Story prepare for the sea hunt at Hanauma Bay on Oahu. Rose and I stared out the kitchen window, last month, while fat robins feasted on [...]
The Earth is Burning. Now Enjoy Chestnuts over the Fire
What does “gardening like there’s no tomorrow” really mean? Do you think your garden, and earth, can avoid the ongoing sixth mass extinction? The U.N.’s recent “bleak” climate report may [...]
Guerrilla Gardening in the Alley, a Rudbeckia Revolution
Be realistic, demand the impossible. Che Guevara I am waging war against frustration, and impatience is an obstacle. My struggle may take two or three years before there is a [...]
Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela – the Inspiration of a Guiding Star
My mind was made up 43 years ago after a week filled with cheap vino tinto, emotional Fado music and lots of walking up and down steep hills in Lisbon. [...]
There is No Planet B
Louisville Climate Strike There were student-led Global Climate Strikes all over the world last Friday, inspired by the lovable 16-year old Greta Thunberg. An estimated two hundred people [...]
Louisville is an Urban Heat Island and Needs more People who are Saps for Trees
Tree saps are head over heels for red maples... Natalie Jeremijenko's "Tree Logic" at Mass MoCa, North Adams, MA. Hayly Fisher is a barista. She waters humble sidewalk [...]
The Okra Illuminati
"Artemis Rat Okra” aka V.E.G. Ham. Let me introduce Van Eugene Gatewood Ham, a native of Greenville, Mississippi, with a soft spot for okra. Gene Ham visits Central [...]