Musings on horticultural therapy and the soothing effects of plants and nature
As we cannot often see what is occurring, the night is a quiet period for the senses and much of observable nature. But a simple light can illuminate and even create extreme circumstances. Last evening as my wife and I were heading for bed, the motion detector on the second floor eave clicked on a […]
Surprises in the garden aren’t as rare as one might think though some are sweeter than others. Next to my vegetable garden I have one of my three compost heaps each placed on different parts of my property based more on my laziness to walk all my plant waste to a single location than the […]
Even though I read every guide book I can lay my hands on, when ever I travel I always discover a surprise. On this trip, my surprise is the result of a conversation with my good friend M.R. Rangaswami, who has one foot in the high-tech world and the other in a green one. As […]
View Full Album One of the things that is great about going to a place like Kauai is that there is never an absence of life. You can’t swing a dead chicken or rooster (the Island’s birds) without hitting some fantastic looking flower or plant. Every breadth that you inhale is full of life-affirming scents […]
After a season of wet, fungus-rich weather, my past week in Kauai has been nothing short of a blessing. Morning walks on the beach, beautiful sunrises and -sets, rain only in the evening for brief, short periods. Paradise. But after a while I feel restless. Like something important is missing. As we were walking one […]
One of the sweetest trips of summer are my weekly sojourns to the local farmer’s market. Here the bounty of the season is on display and the biggest problem I have is to select how much should I buy verses harvest from my garden. I always have the same approach: I carefully walk around the […]
Taking certain things for granted can be very dangerous as it is all to easy to forget what we really hold dear. It wasn’t until my third airport of the day that I finally noticed that these aviation parking lots are devoid of vegetation or natural life save for scrub growth around the runways or […]
Leaving one’s garden as it is coming into its own is a bittersweet event filled with mixed emotions. I now pack for a lengthy and hopefully exotic stay on a beach in Kauai. After spending the last half year in dormancy and now bursting out in full bloom, my garden calls out with the most […]
I know how Noah must have felt. The Northeast has had a spring that makes the Northwest look like the Sahara Desert as we have had fewer days of sun than I have fingers. Most folks I talk with hate this weather and its associated gloom and dampness. Few plants are coming out with the […]
One of the things that has often struck me about gardening articles and literature is that the end result is always a wonderful plant or the perfect fruit. A rose, a peach, a melon. You know what I mean. A few years ago William Alexander wrote a book on his gardening exploits and wound up […]