Category: nature

Lady Bird Johnson

Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

Today, December 22, is the centenary of the birth of environmental advocate, businesswoman, and former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson (Claudia Alta Taylor).

Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis). Public domain hoto by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis)

While her husband was president, she created a First Lady’s Committee for a More Beautiful Capital and then expanded its efforts with successful support for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965.

In 1982, Johnson and actress Helen Hayes created an organization to protect the native plants and natural landscapes of North America.  It became the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas.

Some of her words:

“Though the word ‘beautification’ makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”

“The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.”

You can listen to an interview about Lady Bird Johnson, An Oral History on “The Diane Rehm Show” at the link on the sidebar under “Today’s Quote.”  Adrian Higgins of The Washington Post wrote a tribute to her in October, here.

Public domain photo above by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Season’s Greetings

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Sorry to have disappeared for so long. I went outside to organize my garden by color and got a little obsessed with the process, coming in too tired to blog.  I’ll share some photos as soon as the plants recover enough to look like anything.

My daughter Laura visited the U.S. Botanic Garden next to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., last week and sent me these photos of its holiday display, “Season’s Greenings.”

IMG_0066
A model of the U.S. Capitol building at the U.S. Botanic Garden.  All photos by Laura Koran.

I guess this makes her my first ‘guest blogger.’

In additions to wreaths, garlands, and poinsettias, the indoor display features model trains running by fairy dwellings in an enchanted forest.

The design company Applied Imagination also created models of many of Washington’s landmark buildings (and one fountain) using dried plant materials (supported by acrylic foam boards).

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The show will be open to the public through January 1, 2013, and admission is free.

(a little) Miscellany

There’s an interesting behind-the-scenes video of the U.S. Botanic Garden’s year-long preparations for its “Season’s Greenings” display here.

This video is not terribly recent — from The Washington Post on December 1 — but I thought artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s take on the season’s traditional tree “lighting” was kind of a hoot.

The New York Times had an article last week, here,  about the origins of the punch wassail (the word comes from the Middle English phrase waes hael, to your health) and the carol “Here we come a-wassailing ….”   They’re actually about singing to the health of trees, particularly apple trees.

“The historian Roy Christian, in his 1966 book, Old English Customs, described the apple wassailing that was still taking place in several villages in England’s West Country: ‘The villagers form a circle round the largest apple tree in the selected orchard. Pieces of toast soaked in cider are hung in the branches for robins, who represent the ‘good spirits’ of the tree. The leading wassailer utters an incantation and shotgun volleys are fired through the branches to frighten away the evil spirits. Then the tree is toasted in cider and urged in song to bring forth much fruit.'”

James Golden’s Federal Twist garden in western New Jersey is just as gorgeous in early winter as in all the other seasons.  Please take a look here.

Our garden: flower color

Cindy at enclos*ure8 Comments

I have flower colors on the brain right now.

I’m going to try some (mostly) single-color planting combinations in some sections of the long borders — and dramatic contrasts in others.

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We have blooms all year round here and lots of space. The main borders are along the lower lawn, so I don’t think  that the colorful arrangements will compete too much with our terrace views of the city and hills.

I’ll probably make a good, old mess at first, but I have a year to experiment and a year to make corrections.

The photos above are some reference pictures I took of all the flowers we have right now (a few things aren’t blooming). I’ve been going around and tagging the colors of the roses and daylilies as they bloom.

I have a number of flowering shrubs in the borders that are too big to move, so I will start my color selections with them.

Vintage landscape: beautiful weeds

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“Elizabeth’s Hill, Great Mills vic., St. Mary’s County, Maryland,”  1936-37, Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O Let them be left, wildness and wet:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
–  Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Inversnaid”

A porch in 1941 Mobile and Sunday miscellany

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I love this quiet photo: “Porch of old house at Monroe St., Mobile[, Alabama],” taken November 4, 1941, by Charles W. Cushman.

Used with the permission of  the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection of the Indiana University Archives.  Please do not “pin” or re-blog without contacting them here.

Miscellany

This post on Gardenista is about houses painted black, but I like the way all of them are incorporated into their natural landscapes.  

And GardenHistoryGirl has an interesting post on what we mean when we talk about ‘natural’ and  “beautiful nature.”

From her post, I learned that you can read the entire book The Wild Garden by William Robinson online  here at Google Books.

Please take a look at View from Federal Twist’s fall photos of the Federal Twist garden — just gorgeous.

Jean’s Garden explains here why your favorite plant may have had one name last year and has another today.

Kigali has gone into billboards in a big way in the last few years.  I wonder if it may eventually be building these too (see here too).

Zoe Tilley Poster of Pearled Earth is now selling her beautiful illustrations at her new Etsy shop here.

Francophiles can catch up on gardening news from France at Our Grumpy Gardener, a blog of French News Online.  If you’ve already starting to think about Christmas, the blog Réparons & Re-Parons Noël has good ideas for handmade decorations.

If you would like to see more of the photographs of Charles W. Cushman, click here for a series of images of New York City in the early 1940s.