I found it interesting to look at a map of Michelle Obama’s 1,100 square foot Kitchen Garden that was installed in March on the South Lawn of the White House:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/garden_layout.pdf
I have not seen is any mention of or credit assigned to who actually designed the garden, assuming that the First Lady did not do this herself.
heirloom gardener: The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days 2009: Opening America’s Best Private Gardens
As a follow-up to this prior post, I unfortunately had to miss the open days due to a family emergency. Fortunately, Mary from the Little Red House blog posted some lovely pictures of the day:
Related Post: Garden Tour in Philadelphia, Part I: Chanticleer One of the many pleasures of gardening is the joy that comes from manual labor and literally getting your hands dirty. When non-gardeners look at my garden and ask, “Isn’t that a lot of work?” this particular pleasure is something that is not easily communicated nor understood. This is something that is not widely valued by our modern culture and therefore missing from many lives among both adults and children.
From The New York Times, “The Case for Working with Your Hands” by Matthew B. Crawford, adapted from his upcoming book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work:
“A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.”
Related Post: Last Child in the Woods – Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
View from Federal Twist: Thinking about Gardens: The ThinkinGardens website from the U.K.:
“The ThinkinGardens website is one source of extremely varied, highly opinionated, well written, and knowledgeable writing on gardens. It treats gardens seriously, and as worthy of the same kind of critical analysis as literature, music, and art.”
My nine year-old son spotted this small, handsome snake hiding next to the brunnera in the Front Border. I’ve never even seen a snake in my garden before, and this one was quite a sight: prominent orange spots outlined in black on a white background.
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According to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s website on snakes, it looks like either (i) the “Coastal Plain” Milk Snake integrade, which is a rare cross between the Eastern Milksnake and the Scarlet Kingsnake, (ii) the Scarlet Kingsnake, or the (iii) Northern Scarlet Snake. According to the website, none of them live in Morris County, but then my identification may be off. It looked like a baby, a little thicker than a pencil and no more than one foot long. If there are any ophiophiles out there who can identify it, let me know.
Here are some pictures of the Weigela shrub in full bloom. Each cane is covered with pink and white flowers. As I wrote in a previous post, I used some of these flexible, flowering canes to make a crown of fresh flowers for my daughter’s First Communion.
Heirloom Gardener 