Landscapes IV © Levi van Veluw

Reading over at The Sister Project, I came across something I knew the practice of, but never the name: commonplace book, a place to collect poems, quotes, lists, anything you don’t want to forget. Wikipedia calls them “scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.”

The Polish called their version, in Latin, Silva rerum, a forest of things. Since we’re big tree fans around here, this name suits me better. There is not much gardening going on in these northern latitudes but there is a plenty to look at, think over, talk about, and remember. To help make sense of the 40-odd tabs open in 4 different Firefox windows on this laptop, here’s my December forest of things.

Sibley has written a guide to trees! I’m hoping to find it and that it will help finally reveal the identity of the mystery tree, among so many others in the hills I’d like proper introductions to.
Thanks to Dry Stone Garden for letting us know about it.

I’ll also be reading two new tree blogs I found,Exploring the World of Trees, and Trees & Forests.

It’s time to order my choices from the NARGS seed exchange!

Go on a “romp through the kingdom of fungi” in video with Cornell’s very funny and wise Kathie Hodge. Then check out her excellent Cornell Mushroom Blog. Never was mycology so fun.

Nan at Gardening Gone Wild is building an omnibus of ideas for how to get more fun out of your garden blog in the GWW Garden Blogger’s Idea Gallery. And there I think I’ve found the meme for me: Gardening Oops Day–GOOPS for short. Who doesn’t need to come clean once in a while?

Next to last, a very funny Roy Blount, Jr. article over at Garden & Gun on lawn ornaments (and dogs). Don’t know Garden & Gun yet? You haven’t lived. Seen while taking in Christmas lawn decor over at Grow Where You’re Planted.

Coming full circle, last weekend at Ithaca’s artist’s market, I got to see my friend Jenny Pope, and her print of the hummingbird migration myth reminded me of a poem that stuck with me from the Sister Project story.

© Jenny Pope

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

© Mary Oliver

I find this fascinating.
And apparently the Game Farm Logger takes a lunch break ;)

The season of weather watching has begun.

Update: Click the link or image to go to the weather page to see the soil temp columns the commenters refer to.

or do things with needles,

I would knit shawls for stones,

winter homes for spiders.

The artist blogs at Resurrection Fern.

From a too-short trip to see the Coastal Redwoods of Muir Woods. It’s dark and chilly down in the woods. But still you want to stay and just be with them.

If I get to do this again, it will be with a tripod.

This blog has not had nearly enough cute kittens lately!

It was so sunny & windy on the bay today that my honey was looking for windsurf rental shops, but came up empty. We walked out the 3,000-ft Berkeley pier over the muddy rolling water, which was mezmerizing in its opacity. A friend saw that a fisherman had caught a small shark, but I missed it.

The pier is down past Fourth Street, the location of one of my favorite unvisited nurseries: Cactus Jungle! And so we went. What a place!

I miss growing succulents and cactus, and the Jungle didn’t help. They do all sort of creative things with plants. Living walls…

wreaths…

ornaments…

and then there are supercool sunworshipping dogs.

and still more plants too big to fit in my bag.

How much do you think it would cost to heat a conservatory in upstate NY?

Get your cactus and style fix at the Cactus Jungle blog (and Facebook too).

house up the street

And the Berkeley Horticultural Nursery is a short walk away. I’m wondering what I can fit in my bag.

I want these

Recently the docents did an end of tour season lunch to meet one more time and talk about how the year’s tours went. I remembered sitting in the classroom overlooking the bare Magnolia macrophylla back in early March, feeling wistful, eager, and ignorant. My goals were to learn more about the plants where I live, more about the outdoor classroom of Plantations (since it taught me so much already just nosing around), and to get outside myself by talking about things that are easy to talk about when you love them and are excited. There at lunch with our teacher and a few of the old pro docents, in the classroom overlooking the fading Magnolia, I felt confident, comfortable, and a notch above ignorant. Shame we’ll have to wait until next May to get going again–the newbies were just hitting our stride.

Plus, the herb garden is stunning right now, with Stephanandra incisa ‘Crispa’ glowing on the slope, but most of the rest of the plants are becoming textural shells. Hips and berries adorn bare branches, and the formal Winter Garden is coming into its own. Here’s the last photo tour from a walk through the herb garden as it goes to bed.

Hi y’all. Today I officially launch my photography business and web site: www.lynnyenkey.com!
Being in our garden renewed my passion for photography, which was dormant for too long. Plants and the people who grow them are helping shape what I’d like to do with my work, and I have many of you to thank for your kind words and encouragement as I’ve shared images through this blog. Thank you!

Most days you just walk the dog and dig in the yard, and you’re happy. Then some days you wake up and find yourself in the news. This morning I opened email to find a message congratulating this blog on being one of Horticulture magazine’s 20 favorite garden blogs. I know, odd considering I have about 9 regular readers who aren’t my family, and I know most of them. The rest come for silly suit pictures, bloody eyeballs, how hellish getting to the top of either Mt. Colden or Mt. Rainier will be (in my experience, a tossup), and funny turtles, rounding out 8 of the top 10 all time search terms.

I started this blog when I moved east to get married and soon after spend 5 months in Kenya, anticipating a lot of photos and needing a way to share them without spamming our families. That first summer, we dug up the yard, and I fell in love with having the first garden I could truly call my own. Looking for advice, I found the garden bloggers. Through them I’ve gained essential knowledge, inspiration, confidence, and friendship, and I’m grateful. There are so many great garden blogs that I know tomorrow’s top 20 would look totally different, so it’s a real honor to be recognized today.
Thank you.

If this is your first visit, I hope you’ll come back for the gardening & the seasons, and hang around for the travel, the music, and the beagle.