Category Archives: Gardens

How to Grow a Landscape

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Francois Lachance

e.e. cummings poem 82 from 95 poems (here is that rain awaited by leaves with all their trees and by forests with all their mountains) if it were not for the parentheses the scene would keep on being enlarged And … Continue reading →

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Out of Time into Memory

Posted on March 12, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Ellen Frye in Amazon Story Bones has a passage that cries out for an annotation by a scholar of botanical history. A river that brings us sweet water, quince trees, apples and pears. The land’s rich here. Stony, but rich. … Continue reading →

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Pack Rats and Control Freaks

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Jennifer Bennett in the “On Earth” chapter of Our Gardens Our Selves Despite my calling this place mine, I had come to realize that I was a visitor. I had only a temporary influence upon a place with its own … Continue reading →

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Transit

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Francois Lachance

In the “On Water” chapter of Jennifer Bennett’s Our Gardens Ourselves: Reflections on an Ancient Art one finds a lovely meandering sentence that reminds one of a slowly trickling stream or of the tranquil disappearance of evaporation trails. It is … Continue reading →

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Hankering (summer haiku)

Posted on February 10, 2008 by Francois Lachance

In February, in this part of the world, the light has returned but the warmth remains remote. It is perhaps no wonder that the summer-themed haiku are written during the cold of winter. Gazing out the window upon the skeletal … Continue reading →

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Where Laboratory meets Library

Posted on January 12, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Jennifer Bennett in Our gardens, ourselves : reflections on an ancient art quotes Elizabeth Lawrence to the effect that I cannot help it if I have to use my own well-designed garden as a laboratory, thereby ruining it as a … Continue reading →

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Tulip Temptations

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Anna Pavord in The Tulip relates the strange and wonderous story of William Pegg. Derby’s star flower painter was William Pegg (1775-1851) whose father had been a gardener at Etwall Hall, near Derby, a hotbed of societies devoted to the … Continue reading →

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Song and Bloom

Posted on October 31, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Amy Lowell “Lilacs” reminds me of Walt Whitman (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“) in its reach but its far shorter lines betoken a far different relation between botany and geography than Whitman’s lament. Lowell has us on a … Continue reading →

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