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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Another blog to follow: Scott Gatty's "Who Knows Where Or When"

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I have begun, once in a while, to feature other bloggers I enjoy. I will feature Oma, one of my very favorites, in a future column: she’s a gardener (which is +100 points on my scorecard) who lives in an English cottage (“Can we visit her? Can we stay with her?” Partner wants to know), and she takes wonderful photos, and she writes nice fiction too, and you should follow her.

 

 

And I recently featured another of my favorites, Attila Ovari. He’s an Australian husband/father who writes about management, and family, and many other topics; he’s also wonderful, and you should follow him.

 

 

Today I want to feature whoknowswhereorwhen.

 

 

He is on Tumblr. His name is Scott Gatty (he’s like me, he uses his full name on his website). He is a gardener and photographer and all kinds of other things. He also writes very well. This is from his Tumblr profile:

 

 

The thing that has fascinated me most in life is Time, the passage of it and my relationship to it as I age.

 

I was born in 1957, and as each year goes by, I find out more events that took place in that splendiferous year: the first artificial satellite was put into orbit by the Commies and set off a panic here; the first Pink Flamingo lawn ornament rolled off the assembly line; "The Cat in the Hat" was first published, by Dr. Seuss; Burt Bacharach joined with lyricist Hal David to create some wonderful songs; and, five days after I was born, John Lennon was introduced to Paul McCartney. Kinda neat, eh? . . .

 

I love the plant world – sometimes, I think, as if I actually were part of it. They're the other major form of life with which we share this planet, but very few people treat plants with the dignity and respect they deserve. I remind people: we need them, they don't need us.

 

 

 

I think we’re the same person in alternate universes; he got to be a gardener (which, because I live in an apartment, is forbidden to me) and I want to be a photographer and he is a photographer, and we’re both very aware of time, and we were both born in 1957, and . . .

 

 

 

But anyway.

 

 

Follow his blog.

 

 

More recommendations soon.

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Again with the Olympics

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Are you bored with the Olympics yet? Not me! It’s been a thrill a minute. Not so much the events, which I find mostly pretty dull. But the stories, egad, the stories!

 

 

Roll the presses:

 

 

Two brothers from Yorkshire won (respectively) the gold and bronze medals in the triathlon. (No, I didn’t know what the triathlon was either. It’s an endurance event, something like the American Iron Man events; contestants have to swim, and run, and cycle, in quick succession.) The UK is over the moon about this. According to Oma, my informant who lives in Luton, not far from London, the brothers wanted to cross the finish line simultaneously, but were told they couldn’t.  (Have you heard about this? Me neither, until Oma tipped me off, and then I read an article in the Financial Times on Wednesday morning. I know: we care mostly about American athletes, and NBC figures we couldn’t care less about a couple of nice young men from Yorkshire. But what a story!)

 

 

A weightlifter from Germany dropped the barbell on himself. It was a pretty horrible scene: a German athlete, Matthias Steiner (who won the gold medal in Beijing in 2008), was hoisting 432 pounds over his head, and his arms buckled, and the weight came down on top of him. It gave me pause. Some of these events are dangerous. You can at least sprain or injure yourself while weightlifting (for example), and at worst you can actually drop a huge weight on yourself, as happened here. Remember the poor young Georgian in Vancouver, Nodar Kumaritashvili, only twenty-one years old, who wiped out on the luge and died of his injuries? Remember poor young Greg Louganis, who hit his head on the diving board back in 1988? He said it didn’t hurt that much, but I cannot imagine hitting your head on a diving board while spinning around in the air feels all that great. (There are certain events that carry little risk of personal injury; table tennis comes to mind. Yes, I know, things can still happen while playing table tennis, but – you know? I could go in the kitchen right now to make a sandwich, and slip, and hit my head on the counter.)

 

 

The beach volleyball matches have turned into the hot ticket at the London games. A FT columnist wrote a very funny column on Wednesday about the matches: it’s like a party, everyone in the stands is drinking and having fun, there are dancers on the floor of the arena between matches, and the announcer is more like a party DJ. Now: don’t you wish you were there, even though you don’t care two bits for volleyball?

 

 

Grenada has a gold medal. Remember Grenada? The USA invaded it in 1983, for some reason I don’t quite remember. Well, they have a gold medalist, Kirani James, in the men’s 400-meter. The whole island has gone properly insane, and was given a half-day holiday to celebrate. (I remember, when I was in Morocco in 1984, we (Moroccans) won two gold medals. The country went berserk. I was in Casablanca on the day the athletes came home from Los Angeles, and it was proper bedlam. It puts Michael Phelps’s smirking about winning seventy-five medals into perspective. Who cares if you’re a medal-winning freak from a country that always wins anyway? We like to see the less-represented countries win. It’s kind of what the Olympics are all about. Right?)

 

 

Iceland keeps trying to win a gold medal in handball. I will not even try to tell you the backstory on this one. Here’s the outline: Iceland has had a hard time over the past couple of years, economic collapse, blah blah blah. They won the silver medal in handball in Beijing in 2008. (There is a museum in Reykjavik which displays a sculpture called “The Icelandic Handball Team”; it’s a set of full-sized silver penises, which denote national pride.) Iceland was hell-bent to win gold this year. As of this writing, they have lost their chance. But they are doughty. And there’s always 2016, providing the Maya are wrong about this whole end-of-the-world thing

 

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Swans win gold in London. From Wednesday’s FT: “London is now so obsessed with the Olympics the very wildlife turned to imitation: on the Serpentine a five-strong group of swans broke away from a peloton of Canada geese.”

 

 

Even the swans and geese are getting into it.

 

 

As Oma, in Luton, wrote to me the other day: “It's been a great games so far and I'm loving it, loving it, loving it.”

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