Garden Musings

In the first essay in Garden Musings, this gardening writer states, "The evidence keeps racking up that I, the Hoosier-born offspring of several generations of farmers, chose through ignorance to garden in a delightful area combining the world's worst soil and an exasperating climate, all augmented by various man-made and natural catastrophes such as tornadoes, droughts, prairie fires, hail, drenching rains, ice-storms, late freezes, boiling summers, and seventy mile per hour winds. " Gardening, with all the pressures of struggle between the environment, wild animals, and the gardener, and particularly in the harsh Kansas weather, is not for the faint-hearted as demonstrated by the many essays in the book including Sweet (Corn) Pain, Weather-Weary, Midden Misery, and Soil Sorrows. While the essays are full of useful personal observations about gardening style, plant information, and garden practices, the author also turns his wry eye on tumbling a number of gardening tenets and institutions as he turns his attentions on composting, lawn maintenance, and landscape designers who work primarily in junipers, Japanese barberry and Stella de Oro daylilies. The timing and content of programming of the Home and Garden Television Network and the lack of availability of G-rated gardening statues are other topics that don't escape this garden curmudgeon. Gardeners searching for practical advice or simply for winter-reading pleasure will all find fulfillment within these pages.

The Garden Journal is a beautiful, heirloom-quality journal where gardeners can record their wishes and wants, daily happenings, and successes and challenges over the course of 5 years.

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden—and the friends who remembered it—had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mother's garden.” By the time Welty died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history—and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century—with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Songs for Parents" by John Chipman Farrar. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.