The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is for this week is to represent the word Awakening. The first photo that sprung to mind is the eruption of milkweed in my monarch habitat garden in the spring. Usually, the itch gets too much to bear and forces me to go looking for this sign of spring. It…
Gray – Grey. The sky is grey today. Heavy, Opaque, Still. A glimmer of peach at the horizon can be seen if you look for it. It says there is more light somewhere, today. White. Tiny white ice crystals knocked on my window and fell to the deck below, covering it with a speckled veil…
In October, I accepted a position as a Garden Club Advisor for an internationally themed elementary school in our area. It is a well-known, well-respected school of choice, locally. I do not want to say I was a shoe-in for the position, but I interviewed offering 13 years of experience of leading a garden club…
One of the best gifts I received this holiday season was a PBS documentary video called, “Plants Behaving Badly”, in which two types of amazing plants – orchids and carnivorous plants – are described in detail. I am lucky that my husband indulged me with this item on my wish list. Home alone on Saturday afternoon,…
This morning I feel like I am just spinning my wheels. Flitting from project to project and not focusing or getting much done. I do have things to do, too. February brings participation in a local “maker” show with my handcrafted jewelry. March brings two presentations on gardening for a local conference of the same…
The following are my postings for Cee’s Photo Challenge: Amaryllis for December 18th, 2017, The amaryllis is a large, colorful flowering bulb that is popular at holiday time. For the last two years, I have had the pleasure of planting 100-200 of these bulbs with individual elementary students at our local schools. If you are…
Between yesterday and today I taught five classrooms of students about poinsettias. They ranged from second to fifth grade. What follows is some of what I shared with them. The poinsettia is named after Dr. Joel Poinsett, the first American ambassador to Mexico. Dr. Poinsett, whose hobby was botany, saw the plant while on a…
Recently, while reading posts offered by members of a reflective blog writing group to which I belong, there were a couple that caught my eye. The authors, two separate people, wrote on the memories that specific plants evoke for them. I understood completely! Plants are powerful! My grandma always had african violets. They seemed to…
My graduate course in Advanced Interpretive Media Design ended yesterday. It was a three credit course in six weeks, NRES769, via the College of Natural Resources at one of the UW system schools. It was a very challenging, and yet, enlightening course. I learned how to make interpretive media using such software programs as Photoshop…