Gardening blogs

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Oma, one of my favorite Wordpress bloggers, recently presented me with the “Beautiful Blogger Award.” It’s one of those blog-specific awards that encourages you to pass the award along to blogs you read and admire, so that your own readers can read them and try them out.

 

 

Today I’d like to give you three blogs, all of which are favorites of mine, and all of which are about gardening, one way or another.

 

 

(Why gardening? Because I love it, and I have nowhere to garden. I had a little plot in the local community garden for a couple of years, but the snobbery became so intense that I had to drop it. Now I live vicariously through other people’s gardens. Like these.)

 

 

First of all: Oma’s own blog, “Cottage Life in England.” Oma lives in a completely enchanting cottage in Luton, and takes wonderful photos of everything – her garden, her house, food, her grandson – and is very good at documenting everything. She and I write about some of the same things: getting older, food, plants – and write little notes back and forth sometimes. (We’re kindred souls, in that both of us generally know the scientific names of the plants we’re discussing.) She also writes very well. I recommend her highly.

 

 

Second: “The Soulsby Farm.” This is a couple in Ohio who run a real honest-to-God farm, and take photos, and document their experiences. They’re a lot of fun, and very down-to-earth. They write about things that are of interest to all gardeners: insect control, weed control, fertilizer. They recently ran an Ugly Tomato contest. I like them; I always get a smile out of their posts, and sometimes I actually learn something. Again: high recommendation.

 

 

Third: “Tangly Cottage Journal.” These are professional gardeners blogging from the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state, where my parents used to take us for summer vacations. I love the area – it’s wild and very beautiful. This blog will give you a very precise image of the area, and the vegetation (which is all over the map – it rains constantly, and is very warm), and the challenges of creating a garden in a place where Nature wants to do everything at once. These are professional gardeners, so they hold everyone and everything to high standards. I love them, and I love their posts, and their photos.

 

 

If you love flowers and gardens and good writing, follow all three of these, please.

 

 

If you don’t: what’s wrong with you?

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Going to the beach

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When you grow up in the Northwest (as I did), going to the beach is a unique experience. The Northwest seashore is cold and foggy most of the time, even in the summertime, and not terribly welcoming.  Still, we went at least one day a year. It was a two-hour drive each way, to a little town called Long Beach, Washington, which was the usual beachfront honky-tonk town, with arcades and candy stores (I associate it with the smell of cotton candy, and I was there a few years ago, and am pleased to tell you that it still smells like cotton candy). 

 

 

Down the road from Long Beach is Ilwaco, a fishing port at the mouth of the Columbia.  (Ilwaco doesn't smell like cotton candy; it smells like low tide and fish guts. But it has its charms too.) My father sometimes went salmon fishing on a charter boat out of Ilwaco; they'd go out very early, spend the day retching their guts out (the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia is famous for being choppy), and come back empty-handed.  Then, on our way home, we'd stop in a little town called Chinook and buy a huge whole salmon for fifteen cents a pound, and pack it in ice in the trunk of the car. Dad would clean it when we got home, and we had a freezer full of salmon steaks to eat all winter long. 

 

 

In 1978 I relocated to Rhode Island, the Ocean State.  Here you're never more than eight or nine yards away from a nice beach: Goosewing, Horseneck, Misquamacut, Narragansett, Moonstone.  (Moonstone was for a long time a nude beach.  Then the state decided to protect the piping plover, which (coincidentally) nested on the nude beach. And that was the end of that.)

 

 

In the Peace Corps, I was lucky enough to be posted to two places with beaches attached: Kenitra in Morocco, which has a lovely beachtown called Mahdia Plage nearby, and Tunis, with its long arc of beaches stretching out through Carthage to La Marsa. 

 

 

For one dangerous moment in Morocco I thought about becoming a professional expatriate, living in Tangiers with Paul Bowles and William Burroughs and the rest of the louche lowdown American crew I found there. 

 

 

Good sense talked me out of it.  But it would have been wonderful to wake up and look down at the Strait of Gibraltar every morning while having my morning coffee.

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