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Favorite Trivia – GARDENING
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| Carl Linneus created a floral clock. He arranged flowers in sequence, since he knew what time each flower opened and closed each day (since each is synchronized to light).
Diane Ackerman – Cultivating Delight |
| “I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color and scent.”
Diane Ackerman – Cultivating Delight |
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“Baby said Laura E. Richards – The Difference |
| I like not lady-slippers, Nor yet the sweet-pea blossoms, Nor yet the flaky roses, Red or white as snow: I like the chaliced lilies, The heavy Easter lilies, The gorgeous tiger-lilies, That in our garden grow. T.B. Aldrich – Tiger Lilies |
| A garden entirely stocked with the newest, showiest hybrid is as depressing as a woman with a face lift: the past is erased at the expense of character.”
Eleanor Pereny – Green Thoughts |
| “Though an old man, I am a young gardener.”
Thomas Jefferson |
| “All my hurts my garden spade can heal.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Musketaquid |
| “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.”
Jerry Smith |
| “He that plants pears, plants for his heirs.”
Statius |
| “The magic of the dandelion seems to lie in its hold on life. Dig it up by the roots from the lawn, drench it with weed-killers, ‘eradicate’ again and again: in a few weeks’ time there it is, unvanquished, showing its lovely yellow head in the green grass. Just the way it seeds itself is a marvel: the small light seed is blown about by the winds and kept buoyant by a tiny parachute of hairs until it comes to rest, digs itself in, sends down roots, grows, and flourishes—invincible. Its leaves, stalk, and roots contain a bitter milky juice which has always been considered a tonic and a heart remedy and a drier-up of warts.”
Maria Leach – The Soup Stone: The Magic of Familiar Things |
| “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.”
Thomas Gray |
“Once upon a time, *Flowers have faces as distinctive and individual as people. The French believed that the pansy had a pensive or thoughtful face and dubbed it herb de la pensée, the flower of thought or remembrance. English gardeners took up the word pensée and Anglicized the spelling to pansy. Kathryn Kleinman & Sara Slavin – On Flowers |
| “The flower-arranger’s art is one of balance. In the classic approach to arranging flowers, you imagine a strong central line running top to bottom from the highest point to the base of the container. To look ‘pleasing’ to Western eyes, flowers are arranged so that equal weight appears on either side of the imaginary line.”
Kathryn Kleinman & Sara Slavin – On Flowers |
| “During the cold, bleak winters between 1940 and 1945, when Germany occupied Holland and food was scarce, many Dutch dug their tulip bulbs out of the garden. Scrubbed clean, the bulbs were baked or boiled, then eaten to ward off starvation.”
Kathryn Kleinman & Sara Slavin – On Flowers |
| Potpourri: French for “rotten pot.” |
| “Day 135. I’ve been trying to engage in some agriculture, seeing as so many biblical laws involved farming. I bought cucumber seeds online . . . The cucumbers do grow—they each get to be the size of a Good & Plenty candy. And then they promptly die. I don’t understand why . . . My hope had been to leave cucumber ‘gleanings.’ The idea of gleanings is one of my favorites in the Bible. It goes like this: When you harvest your field, don’t reap the entire field. Leave the corners unharvested so that the leftovers—the gleanings—can be gathered by the poor. It’s a beautiful and compassionate rule. Plus, the commandment rewards people for doing a half-assed job, which I think is a nice notion.” [January 13, 2006]
A.J. Jacobs – The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible |
| “Don’t take personally the defection of leaves. You can’t be abandoned by what you never owned. Spring will give back more green than you can bear.” Carole Oles – from A Manifesto For the Faint-Hearted |