Portraits of dried leaves by Friends, 1816 (the year without a summer)

Julius Friedrich Ferdinand In the long winter of 1816, the year without even a summer, there were food riots in the UK and famines in China ...

George Orwell's Garden History: "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray"

 "Some years ago a friend took me to the little Berkshire church of which the celebrated Vicar of Bray was once the incumbent. (Actuall...

The Cabbage that is King: Brassica oleracae longata

Or, the curious case of the seven-foot tall cabbage, which brought two seedsellers and one Reverend Laycock of Hampshire into Westminster Co...

Crooked Forests

A forest of about 400 pine trees in Western Poland all grow with a 90 degree northward  bend at the base of their trunks.  The patch, within...

1960s Landscapes in the Help

Nearly a year ago, now, I got a request through the blog for more information about the early 1960s landscape, about which little (so far!) ...

Hay in the Landscape

I grew up with this painting on the wall of my parent's home;   a gigantic haybale constructed by my great-grandmother Rose's family...

Garden History Images of the Week: Mexican landscapes in the Codex pictorius Mexicanus of Ignacio Tirsch

These images are so beautiful that they actually make me feel the pangs of nostalgia--for a Mexico I never saw and never will see.  Circa 17...