Garden

I believe in paint.  It’s cheap.  It makes huge changes in a matter of hours.  Paint is the poor garden maker’s Yellow Brick Road to bold, beautiful spaces.Why is it that we are so afraid of color?  I suspect it’s all about our mothers who warned us from an early age to avoid garish hues [...]

By JOE LAMP'L
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Recently I wrote about fall being the perfect time to plant bulbs and I shared information on how to go about doing that properly. Unfortunately because of word count limitations, I didn't have room to tell the whole story.

As I've since learned from several of you, protecting those bulbs from pesky critters once you planted them would have come in handy.

Visions of the Old West are filled with cowboys and cattle drives, wood frame farmhouses and log cabins. We who love all that is western surround ourselves with the art, artifact and architecture that has epitomized this golden era of America’s youth. Yet rarely is that romance taken into the garden to extend this ambiance.The [...]

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Monday, November 20, 2006

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.  —George Washington CarverYams aren’t just for Thanksgiving dinner.  They are a beautiful African - and African American - dietary staple that scientist George Washington Carver developed into dozens of new [...]

By MAUREEN GILMER
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Nothing evokes feelings of the midwinter holidays like the fragrance of needled evergreens.

In the language of aromatherapy, the essences of pine, fir, spruce and cedar all conjure feelings of comfortable days by the fire as snow flies outside.

With ten characteristics was the earth created: wisdom and understanding; knowledge and strength; rebuke and might; righteousness and justice; mercy and compassion.  -The TalmudThese virtues or characteristics are reflected not only in human behavior but in the ecological processes of the earth.  Through knowing the vital interconnections of all species, we learn wisdom and understanding.  [...]

Sharecropping was big business in old England. If you were lucky enough to own a manor house with extensive landholdings, you needed workers to make it pay. So you gave them a bit of your land to farm and they would return a share of each crop as payment.Problem was that sharecropping peasants weren’t always [...]

They say the only real winners in the California gold rush were the guys who sold the shovels. Correction—the guys who sold the shovels and the whiskey.Scotch broom untouched by livestock in a well grazed Sierra Nevada pasture.It is this human desire for inebriation that may explain how Scotch broom made it across the Atlantic [...]

Snow falling on palms seems an oxymoron in any one’s garden, but it isn’t as odd as you think. Sure, we tend to group palm trees with an island paradise, and it’s natural to conclude that a winter cold snap means palma non surviva. If you live at the frost line, fear not, because a [...]