Presidential Consequences and my Meadow
Early February. Pam Spaulding photo. I squeaked by in high school chemistry doing little more than fiddling around with the Bunsen burner so it would throw flames like [...]
Allen Bush
On the legacy of our country neighbor, Otis Knox
Otis Knox in his 2018 sunflower field. I would not have batted an eye at Mr. Stripey if Otis Knox had not insisted it was the best [...]
Hosed Again
In the beginning there were blessed, soaking rains. Then came the curse of the tangled hose. The Romans built aqueducts to move water around. I, on the other hand, drag [...]
To lower the heat, let’s sit and talk in the shade of a big sugar maple
Rufus patrols the border. It’s hard to stay on top of runaway name-calling. Most of the tried and true insults now look like tread-bare bald tires, but [...]
Louisville’s Big Rock in Cherokee Park – So What if it’s Not the Biggest Rock in the World?
Big Rock Tai Chi Club, May 2020 I have spent nearly 20 years at the Big Rock corner of Louisville’s Cherokee Park. I meet here regularly with [...]
Yes, by all Means Start Gardening Now. And Don’t Sweat It
Neither sorrow nor fear has diminished home gardening’s potential to heal during this pandemic spring. Chris Beytes of Grower Talks, the respected commercial trade magazine, has been keeping tabs [...]
Blackberry Winter and a Bucket of Blooms
Rose and Cooper—mother and son. “Time is not a movement, a flowing, a wind then, but is, rather, a kind of climate in which things are, and [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]