Backyard/Garden
One of the fun things about my job as an editor at Audubon Magazine is seeing the topics that we feature in our pages making a splash in mainstream publications or on popular news shows, even if it's years after we wrote about them. And that's exactly what happened this morning when I opened the newspaper and read Anne Raver's article about rain barrels.
That lovely tune from the Great American Songbook has been stuck on repeat in my head since I found the dooryard carpeted with wild violets the other morning. I hear several different versions, by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Hartman, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Matt Dennis wrote the music, Tom Adair the lyrics. Of course they wouldn't be Politically Correct today, when wearing fur risks a paint attack, but to a romanticist they are poetry:
Western bumblebee on scarlet gilia [photo copyright David Inouye]
Last week, on what passes for a warm spring afternoon here in the south-central Rockies, I planted the heirloom tomato starts I've nurtured indoors since early March. As I worked, I scanned my kitchen garden for insects.
With spring on its way and my garden beckoning, I've been thinking about a conversation with Frances E. Kuo, director of the University of Illinois Landscape and Human Health Laboratory on her research on kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and time spent in nature.
A few days before Thanksgiving, the thermometer on our back porch read two degrees at dawn, and I worried about my kitchen garden. When I pulled back the insulating row covers later that morning, I was relieved to see the greens a bit wilted, but still quite alive. I was counting on them for our Thanksgiving meal.
