Gloria's Oversexed Mind

(psssst, quick! someone call the Christian Right! Not only is Mother Nature a pagan, she's a pornographer!)

And now, with serious apologies to Joyce Kilmer, ...

I think that I shall never see
a fuck-you finger on a tree.
A tree whose droughty roots despair
that anyone will give it care.
A tree that looks at men all day
and curses at them, "Go away!"
A tree that may in seasons wear
birdshit and garbage in its hair.
Upon whose branches smog has lain.
Who rightfully fears acid rain.
Bad verse is writ by twits like me.
But Nature made this fuck-you tree.

July 21, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden, Sexual Humor | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those following our harvests, it was another yummy weekend fresh-food fest chez Brame. From the Ketzl's blog:

weekend garden update [07 Jul 2008|08:48am]

Harvest total for the week: 10 cukes, 15 tomatoes, 5 acorn squash (there's more, I just haven't brought them in yet), 1 pint raspberries, 22 pints of blueberries (!), 1/2-pint wild blackberries, 3 quarts green beans. Oh, and one giant red marconi pepper.

What to do with all that fresh food? We made the best blueberry pie you or I have ever tasted, froze a quart of blueberries and 2 quarts of beans, made 9 jars of raspberry/blackberry jam, 1 18-oz jar of blueberry pie filling, 1 jar of blueberry-curacao jam, made tasty cucumber-sour cream salad and a bean-tomato ratatouille (W's delicious creation), and still have baskets of fresh produce littering the kitchen.

Let me second the girl's words: the blueberry pie was just incredible. So plump and juicy they were like tiny sweet plums. The beans tasted better than any beans I've ever tasted, no doubt because of the fresh sweet tomatoes Will cooked with 'em, to toothsome saucy perfection. As for the cucumbers, I keep marveling at how much better they taste than anything I've had from a grocer's shelves--especially with the sour-cream dressing Ketzl makes for 'em. *slurp* I've never been a fresh-food maniac but this summer's harvest could easily make me one now.

I remember back to our first and second years here -- we did get some fine tomatoes but mainly it was squash, squash and more squash (crooknecks, from reseeding plants the previous owners had). I got so sick of eating squash, I got a little surly about all the creative recipes to make one night's squash taste different from yesterday's squash. You can't fool me: it was still SQUASH for fuck's sake. Delicious when rare but a food that gets awfully old awfully quick. But now I'm actually looking forward to squash, esp. since Ketzl has finally fought back the crookneck and planted some interesting winter varieties. Of course what I can't WAIT to try are the jams. Blueberry jam in liqueur: that's what I want to be eating when the apocalypse comes, yeah.

July 7, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some of the stuff (minus bags of greenbeans) Jen harvested from our garden today.

Link

June 29, 2008 in Autobiographical Urges, Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (3)

View out our front door

Hydrangeas on the hill

Picked from Ketzl's garden for dinner tonight. Simmered and served with sauteed portobello mushrooms by Will.

Ripe ruby raspberries plucked by our girl, served fresh. I was promised a tart from them tomorrow!

And...the KITTEN.

June 17, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since I can't get out into the garden today, seems like a perfect time to reflect on the things of nature -- especially their sex habits.

Was fascinated recently to find a couple of studies on the sexual behaviors of flowers. Those pretty little sex organs we take for granted are filled with mysteries and intricate systems for spreading their pollen far and wide. As these mysteries are revealed, they suggest sexual behaviors that seem nearly human. How do plants achieve these coy mechanisms, without brains? And, by the way, wouldn't it be a blast if human sex organs were as versatile in their courtship?

For example, the orchid apparently has perfected a technique that mimics female wasps -- fooling males into mating with them. Scientists weren't sure why they did this but now it seems there is an evolutionary purpose: by drawing male wasps to mate with them (instead of female wasps), the flowers get a larger pool of wasps to carry their pollen to other orchids.

Sexy orchids do more than embarrass wasps: study

Orchids that mimic female wasps may not only waste the time of the male wasps they lure into spreading their pollen -- they also seduce them into wasting valuable sperm, Australian researchers reported on Wednesday.

And the flowers benefit twice -- getting help in their own reproduction, and perhaps indirectly producing more male pollinators in the process.

Some of the most exotic orchids are known to have evolved their convoluted shapes to attract insects, who unwittingly collect and transfer pollen as they try to mate with the flowers.

Meanwhile, have you ever wondered why flowers have long stems that make them wave so freely in the slightest breeze? Me neither. But scientists decided to look into the matter and discovered that it is yet another sexual ploy to attract potential pollinators. While humans may worry about whether size matters, in the world of waving flowers it's all about the wobble.

Flowers "wave" at insects to get their attention, scientists have discovered.

This acts as a powerful signal to passing pollinators, allowing the plant to attract more insects than less mobile flowers growing atop short, thick stems.

"We found wavy flowers are more visible to insects, and thus attract more pollinators and set more seeds," said John Warren.

But flowers ultimately face an evolutionary trade-off, he believes.

"Short, fat-stalked flowers don't wobble enough and are less attractive to pollinators; yet very wobbly flowers are just too wobbly for the insects to handle, as the insects cannot land on them.

"Only flowers that wobble the right amount are successful in setting seeds."

I think people forget, when surrounded by nature, that what really surrounds them is a non-stop orgy of animal and plant lust. Every living thing we see about us diligently goes about the business of getting fucked again and again and again. No wonder I love spending time in my garden.

Here's a youtube view of some lavendar seducing bees:

May 13, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden, Sexual Science and Medicine | Permalink | Comments (0)

My girl took another fantastic set of photos yesterday, capturing close-ups of some of our favorite garden blooms. A selection of my faves. (Almost titled this "reasons why I hate to leave home") :)

Azaleas and rhododendrons

Strawberry begonias

Juicy fruits

Mmmm...blueberries!

and peaches too!

Jen's shady garden highlights

Ferns in filtered light

Hostas, hydrangeas, hellebores, volunteer rose bush in back

A rose is a rose

Cornflowers

Iris

Pot of lobelia

I'm a little purple too: pots of verbena (annual and perennial), with ornamental grasses and sedum

Sunny spots

Pot of creeping jenny with miniature rose bush

Miniature gladiolus

Weigela

Coming very soon!

Jen's freshly prepped veggie beds. These two beds will yield eggplant, tomatoes, beans, sweet potatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, carrots, and greens of various kinds for the summer table. She'll be growing other stuff in other spots. Perennial edibles already coming on strong: figs, asparagus, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries.

I'm finally getting to work on the driveway area. I got a bed of day-lilies established (behind whiskey barrels) but they didn't have enough oomph. Now we've got serious oomph going with this all-new bed. By late summer, there should be a wall of canna varieties, a gigantic brugmansia (see sticks with leaves growing from base) with creamy, foot-long bell-shaped flowers. And, if the rains didn't wash the seeds away, orange and yellow wildflowers (cosmos, mexican hats, zinnias) popping up all over the place.

I'll definitely get a picture up later this season so you can see how (and if) it grew.

May 4, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wish you could change your yard? Consider the possibilities.

This was our house when we first moved here in 2002.

Two years later, in 2004, we had the house painted and the garden was beginning to take shape.

Snapped today, April 30, 2008. The bench and planters so visible above are now sheltered by shrubs.

Today's garden events: a new bird sighted at the feeders by Jen, who quickly shot this photo! Check out the one with black wings and a red throat -- it's a rose-breasted grosbeak. Great joy: this is the very tip of its North American range, so not a common sight in the area, and the first time we've ever seen one.

Newly blooming this week, our mock orange bushes and some early roses.

April 30, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been too bummed to blog but coming out of it now. Late Friday, exactly one week, almost to the hour, after Bobo died, my mother-in-law passed. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost 16 months ago, and so we knew it was only a waiting game. It was a hard and long wait, further complicated by a lot of very complicated family history but I loved my mom-in-law. She was more of a mother to me than my own mother: she listened; she cared; she accepted. Even though I rarely got the chance to let her know, I hope she did -- I think she did. Will is handling it well -- we've been expecting this news for over a year, alas, and he was very reconciled. He is amazingly stoic when it comes to life to death.

Meanwhile all these existential shifts in the nature of our familial realities has driven me to direct emotions and energies at the garden. Everything is feeling so good and so right out there. So many plans, made so long ago, are coming to fruition. Shrubs planted as scrappy pathetic little seedlings, which stood in a limp row like disaffected orphans, are now turning into the hearty, fecund bushes of my imagination. Dead sandy gunk where even weeds wouldn't grow is sweet, wormy loam now, swelling with lush perennials. From a few seeds scattered five years ago, which refused to find purchase in the soil of old, there is now a jungle of yarrow, some already beginning to blossom. Plants I gave up on have decided to live after all, and are putting up robust new stems and leaves. From three tiny primrose starts which barely survived the first year, their third-generation babies have colonized a central bed, poking pink heads up through azaleas and around blueberries.

In trying to bring order to the chaos of the woods here, I opted for something one might call Darwinian Gardening. It was all about the survival of the fittest. I planted thousands and thousands of things out there, in every possible stage of life, from seeds to mature shrubs. The first year was pretty disastrous because almost everything I planted failed or looked unhappy, including mature plants I'd dug from my Atlanta garden and which had been super-reliable for me there. By year two, I realized I could not make any assumptions about the soil, water or light conditions here, and reconciled myself to continuing to lose plants until I amended soil throughout the 2 acre garden area. Years three and four were pretty much dedicated to that effort. I still haven't achieved perfect soil everywhere but I have definitely learned a lot about the land.

Meanwhile, I kept planting and planting and planting, experimenting with everything I could find that I thought might enjoy living in this ecosystem. Once established, though, plants received only minimal care. Weeding, occasional fertilizing (or composting), light trimmings, and dead-heading -- but no fussing. Species that failed more than twice here were never planted again. Everything got a chance to be moved to at least one other spot but if they still couldn't make it, they got crossed off the list. To live here, you have to be a survivor: independent, vigorous for your own reasons, determined to adapt. I've visited home gardens where you can tell that each and every plant has received loving daily care, carefully coaxed to flourish. Not here. I kept my focus on improving living conditions, and let the plants worry about the rest. Embarrassing but true, I had any number of hellaciously scraggly looking suckers out there, and was kind of waiting for them to die to try other species in their spots. Some did crap out, but others (particularly two mock orange bushes I planted as twigs and which had done absolutely nothing but get slightly taller for four years) are now all pumped up with leaves and buds and ready to bloom.

I switched to organic gardening a few years ago and don't use fertilizers or weed-killer. A steady supply of leaf mold, courtesy of the mixed hardwood forest, helps: plants are thriving on "forest food." Anything and everything organic gets added to the soil, from bone meal and lime brought home in giant bags to coffee grounds and shredded newspapers carried out of the house (aka "lasagna gardening", where you layer organic materials on your beds). We keep an eye on bugs but try to stick with organic methods of control. Honestly, I don't mind chewed up leaves here and there, so tend to be lenient unless they get out of control. Probably my favorite form of organic bug control is to send Jen on a canna leaf-roller killing expedition. The girl just loves to crush those little leaf-rolling worms....with a demented look of glee in her eyes, I should add.

Anyway... it's becoming a naturalized garden, which is what a forest garden should be. Formal would look bizarre in the midst of woods with a country-style house. I figured that plants that weren't quite right for these conditions needed to die, leaving room for the plants that love it here. Those species have finally taken over and I'm hoping for a spectacular summer show.

In the comments section, someone mentioned the link between gardening and sex and dominance. Yes. Flowers are sex organs and that is part of the thrill of it. So beautiful, so strange, so fragile, so intoxicating: so very deeply sexual to be in a garden. So alive. There's a link to my dominant side too and the power to create positive change. In five years, you can take a barren woodland clearing and transform it into an oasis. It requires a lot of hard work, a deep focus, and commitment. You control the life and death of not just the thousands of visible plant lives, but a million seldom seen or invisible lives. Everywhere you stick a shovel these days, you find wriggling worms and a dozen other fat little creatures of the soil. Everywhere you go there are frogs and lizards and insects and rodents and garden snakes who have taken up permanent residence. Hundreds of wild birds visit our feeders. Sulphurs and swallowtails are dancing all over the sunny sky. At twilight bats excitedly careen overhead. The satisfaction of this, the feeling of "wow I made this happen" is a lot like the high I get from dominating.

But there is a crucial difference. Gardening keeps you humble. You may have created a garden but to the garden itself you are only the help: the real gardener, unseen and mystical, has done you a favor by giving you the opportunity to serve. You are there to provide, to guide, to assist. But your power is limited. Your success depends on a confluence of events that will always remain beyond your control -- climate, predators, pests, diseases, and, sometimes, the depredations of time.

April 27, 2008 in Autobiographical Urges, Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (4)

While getting the first cup of coffee of the day, I was blown away by blue at the feeder.

Indigo Blue.

image via Ms. Lume@flickr

It was so so blue, so tiny, so beautiful. A few things I just learned about this charming little bird.

The Indigo Bunting migrates at night, using the stars for guidance. It learns its orientation to the night sky from its experience as a young bird observing the stars. All About Birds

A group of buntings are collectively known as "a decoration of buntings", "a mural of buntings", and a "sacrifice of buntings." Whatbird.com

Despite the appearances of monogamy, recent advances in genetic analyses have revealed that 20-40% of the buntings born in a season are fathered by males other than the holder of the territory in which the young are born. Another fly in the pudding of nuclear family life is that about 15% of breeding males will have as many as four females on their territory, either simultaneously or over a season. The Smithsonian

They're polygamous star-guided lovers! Wish I could see a flock of them, so I can say I saw a sacrifice of buntings.

(OTOH, that might make some people think I witnessed some strange voodoo ritual......)

April 24, 2008 in Pets and Animal Love, Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (0)

Come take a walk through our gardens with us. Will took all these shots earlier today with our nifty new Canon PowerShot A590.

First, a view of the house as seen from a row of very vigorous blueberries.

Some friends gave us a Buddha Dog for the garden (thanks R&C!), and he now occupies a shady little shrine outside the front door. Behinds him (in pots) variegated ivy and a variegated creeping hydrangea.

I was working on a planter when a bright red light flashed in my eye. I realized I was staring into the psychedelic neck feathers of a hummingbird. He recognized me as friend. If he'd recognized me as foe, he would've dive-bombed my head. Hummers are as viciously territorial as they are beautiful. I've planted a ton of things to lure them here.

The old canna bed, now about one fifth its original size with some of the giant rocks Will dug up. For scale, the cannas are about 2 ft. tall now.

One of the new canna beds, at the edge of the woods. Same cannas, same height, in a new sunny area we had cleared last year. They can grow and grow into a wall now. One day, there will be a huge pond back there

Close-up of my favorite irises

Same irises, with blue lobelia in the boxes behind them (and daylilies and yarrow surrounding them)

Heavenly bamboo berries.

A now-destroyed red ant hill. It was massive -- this is after I chopped it down with a shovel. It ate one of our lights.

These euonymous were about one foot tall and scraggly when I planted them. Now they are beginning to overgrow the azalea they're surrounding.

Some fruit-bearing trees that Jen planted: fig trees and, on the right, a paw-paw.

A leather mahonia, ripe with berries. The red behind them are lorapetalum.

Native phlox (in a weedy tree box) beside an oak. The irises will be blooming soon.

Some photinia we planted near the wood's edge.

Happy pieris in a box by the front deck. The boxes out front were filled with rocks and sterile soil when we got here.

Potted geranium between pots of sedum.

Red azales in full bloom.

Small bed of annual salvia, filling in where mums will take over later this year.

View to the garden shed, past azaleas and hydrangeas.

Shady rock bed at the end of the deck.

Geraniums don't feed hummers but the flowers draw them in. They love to see red flowers in a garden and will move in early if you put some out.

And, finally, Bobo's peaceful grave

April 22, 2008 in Autobiographical Urges, Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's a perfect day in Athens. Absolutely perfect. I went into the garden a couple of hours after waking, just walked in to check voicemail and email, and plan to go back out and stay there until the sun sets or I run out of energy, whichever comes first. Moving and dividing the gigantic canna bed yesterday was very labor-intensive so today I'm focusing on a hundred smaller projects I've been meaning to get to. Among other things, even though I didn't even grow coleus last year, some plants from two seasons ago reseeded so freely I've got a gezillion coleus seedlings popping up in a path, right through the gravel. Jen pointed it out to me last week and I groaned: excavating 2-3 inch seedlings from gravel, not a whole lotta fun. But it wasn't as hard to do as expected, and I salvaged a few dozen. Which is good cuz our lawn men arrive this week and would no doubt have killed them.

There's still about 50-100 cannas out there to move (agh!) but they'll wait until our backs are more rested. Anyone in or near Athens who would like to join me in this madness is welcome to come and cart off enough plants to get an entire small garden going. Want cannas? Ha. It's gotten utterly redonkulous how much we've got to give away!

Blooming now Chez Brame: irises of all types, azaleas and rhodies, some very late perverted tulips (way too warm for tulips yet here they are), lorapetulum, dicentra (aka bleeding hearts), creeping rosemary, the blue flowers whose name I always forget, vinca (the big vining groundcover), phlox, and a handful of bulbs that should've finished by now (anemones, muscari, especially) but are still pretending it's early spring. I won't count the annuals I've recently stuck hither and yon for early color since my real goal is to make the garden all perennial all the time. Otherwise, there are about a thousand plants out there coming in so strong I can't wait to see what it looks like here in a month. Did I mention I've got tons to give away? :)

I'll get back to sex soon.

April 21, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jen found two fantastic quotes about dogs
"You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us" ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

"I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?" ~Sir Walter Scott

We're doing much better. We gardened ourselves to the point of exhaustion yesterday and came in feeling happy and whole. Will undertook the monstrous task of excavating a stand of giant cannas that were about to eat the garden. Some of the original bulbs were about 16" in diameter (!!). We then relocated them (significantly divided) to a new, tilled bed by the driveway, and to another stretch of newly tilled soil at the edge of the woods, behind our burn-pit. Last year some of these cannas were about 8 feet tall. I'm hoping they'll be even more robust in their new spots. My rural community is known as "city of cannas" and, with any luck, this year anyone driving by will see our community spirit.

We have lots more work to do out there--I've let most everything mature in its spot for 2-3 years and the reward now is that everyone is super healthy -- so healthy they've wildly outgrown their spaces. This will be a season of dividing. I've reached the point where I no longer NEED to buy new plants to fill in the scape. Now I've got to move everything around and fill in spare spots with overflow perennials. It's been five years in the making but my original vision for the garden is finally starting to emerge.

Meanwhile, Jen's vision of an edible paradise is about to bear fruit, literally. It's been a great spring and the garden is loving it. Looks like we are going to have amazing crops of figs, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and asparagus this year. We are totally stoked!

More gardening today. The weather is divine. I feel Bobo in the garden with me. I can almost see him running around, keep an eye on me, with that oddly perverted grin on his face that sometimes made him look like a dirty old man.

It's all good. I'm starting to feel good that I had the chance to live with such a great, kooky dog.

April 21, 2008 in Autobiographical Urges, Pets and Animal Love, Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (0)

These would make some pair of maracas, no?

Found on the same search, a penis that pines for you.

March 10, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden, Sexual Humor | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a bright, beautiful, spring-like day today in Georgia, and I'm feeling sunny too. In honor of the natural world, this amazing image of a Red-Veined darter covered in tiny water drops after a shower.

Like...WOW! Compare it to wiki's photo of a dry fly:

February 18, 2008 in Pets and Animal Love, Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ha. Found this 1929 ad in one of the vintage magazines I was perusing for sex-related content last week. When kudzu was first being introduced to Americans and hailed as a miracle plant, must've been real easy for gardeners to be lured by the promise of such a fantastically luxuriant, fast-growing ground-cover. It has, of course, since turned into the ground-cover from HELL, covering everything from native grasses to trees throughout the South. But as with so much, hindsight is always 20-20.

February 18, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

Spring is but a few storms away now in Georgia, and the soil is already waking up. Daffodils and crocus and hellebore are waving, and daphnes and camellias are budded and ready to burst into bloom.

Next time you walk through a garden, remember that every flower is calling to nature, "fuck me, please fuck me." Releasing seeds and spores, dripping pollen, inviting bees - every breeze makes their fragile sex organs tremble. It's one reason I love to garden. Gardens vibrate with nature's naked sexual intensity.

February 11, 2008 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I first moved to Georgia, and had some real land to garden, I made endless discoveries about simple things in nature that New York urban brats don't know. Like one day I saw this really interesting giant mushroom-type thing and when I nudged it gently with my foot, it exploded, showering me with weird fluff. I asked my cultured country husband what the hell just happened and he explained the magic of the puffball, a mushroom which relies on clumsy or curious animals to assist in its reproductive cycle. I promptly declared myself the stooge of fungi and have since felt somewhat cheap and used whenever opportunistic seedpods and other botanical spooge glue themselves to me. Like, whoa, I didn't consent to being the patsy in a lower life form's primitive sexual rituals. SAFE WORD.

So I was moved to read about the plight of the thrips who are tossed into a doubtless frustrating game of push-pull between the Australian cycad's male and female sex organs.

Living fossils have hot nonconsensual sex

US biologists report that the Australian cycad, a primitive tropical plant with large seed cones, uses a novel "pull-push" method to manipulate the tiny flying insects, or thrips, that it relies on for pollination.

The thrips tend to congregate in the male cones (which are much like pine cones) where they feed and make their homes -- but at a certain time of day, the plant will heat up and emit a toxic order, repelling the insects.

The pollen-laden insects then fly to the neighbouring or surrounding female cones which are emitting a more attractive odor, where they pollinate the female plant's eggs.

"The cycads are trading food for sex," said Robert Roemer, a co-author of the paper in the journal Science....

October 15, 2007 in Pleasures of the Garden, Sexual Science and Medicine | Permalink | Comments (1)

Southern farmers are freaking out - and those of who you revel in Georgia peaches and other delicious Southern produce should too - because a spring freeze has wiped out many of our favorite crops.

Although we routinely get a quick and potentially deadly cold snap just about every April, this year's was the all-time worst because temperatures dropped to a record low after weeks of record highs. This meant that things that usually don't bud or flower until later in April were already going strong in early March. If you're a city person, welcome to the true meaning of "nipped in the bud." When you nip the bud, there will be no fruit.

Two weeks ago, my garden was deep in glorious spring, shrubs flowering everywhere, some of Jen's fruit trees already past flowering and seriously into fruiting. We were awash in tiny lime-green or rosy-pink buds everywhere we looked. And now. Well.

Mayim snapped these in the garden yesterday, and sent them to me under the tragically funny heading,Frosty's Visit Did Not Go Well.

Herewith my commentary alongside her photography.

First, ah, those glorious figs which Jen plucked and Will frittered , the sweetest, freshest most memorable culinary delight of last summer, they shall not be on our plates anytime soon. Crisp brown death has destroyed our gluttonous hopes. MAYBE we'll get some yield in the fall. Maybe.

Proud, plump glossy green hosta before:

Pitiful wretch of a limp pale hosta after:

An early iris takes it on the chin.

I confess that after so many years of gardening, I come to these sights much colder (to echo Hopkins). Nature is stronger than us, gives life and gives death through all seasons, no matter our plans. I see this in the garden every year.

In February, a hillside blazes to life in bright yellow,

In April, it looks like a different hillside,

But the earth has its own rhythms and compensations. Some plants soldiered bravely on, others treated the freeze like a salutary tonic.

The tulips were invigorated.

The sweet williams woke up.

The poppies couldn't care less.

The verbena cared - but only a little.

Paradise may seem just out of reach, but the glory of the garden never leaves. You just have to learn to see what beauty remains.

April 15, 2007 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (3)

A giant thanks to my inspired assistant, Mayim, who took these pix of our gardens yesterday.

Hope you like these. I'm thinking of putting up pix every week throughout spring and summer, so you can see what's blooming here. The gardens are now four years old: it's starting to get a soul now.

Please feel free to snag these for your personal use. Gardens should be shared with the world.

It always delights me when people who visit want to wander around the gardens and stop to rest on a bench, enjoying its sweetness.

April 7, 2007 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or, as they are better known, Peter Peppers.

March 20, 2007 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (5)

How cool is this? Our housemate Jennifer is now the garden blogger for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution! She's off to a rocking start with her very first entry today! Rock on, super-girl! You make us proud.

Spading Spaces: Weeding out the truth about me & my garden

September 5, 2006 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (0)

the garden is busy living.

click images to enlarge

Thanks to Jen for the fabulous photography

August 15, 2006 in Pleasures of the Garden | Permalink | Comments (1)

The latest and greatest in sophisticated outdoor art - life-size nude statuary to spice up your garden spaces.

From Naked Sculptures - UK