Yo walks in beauty, like the night

The current issue of New Scientist reports on new American Speech.

To which I can only add, sure, why the hell not?


may i feel said yo
by E.E. Cummings

may i feel said yo
(i'll squeal said yo
just once said yo)
it's fun said yo

(may i touch said yo
how much said yo
a lot said yo)
why not said yo

(let's go said yo
not too far said yo
what's too far said yo
where you are said yo)

may i stay said yo
(which way said yo
like this said yo
if you kiss said yo

may i move said yo
is it love said yo)
if you're willing said yo
(but you're killing said yo

but it's life said yo
but your wife said yo
now said yo)
ow said yo

(tiptop said yo
don't stop said yo
oh no said yo)
go slow said yo

(cccome?said yo
ummm said yo)
you're divine!said yo
(you are Mine said yo)

On the eleventh day of Christmas

my true love gave to me,

eleven ladies dancing.

And a few of their friends,










You might know them as Rose campion (Lychnis coronaria) "Dancing Ladies", because they look like little swaying dancers in brightly-colored ballgowns. Especially if you are in the garden early in the morning before that first cup of coffee and without your glasses.

The picture above is from the online catalogue of Johnny's Selected Seeds in Maine, which offers a great variety, including organic and heirloom seed. Imagine a whole garden full of dancing ladies, for the bargain price of $1.80 -- the cost of a packet of seed.

This is the season gardeners love, planning the new year's garden while snow is still on the ground. For me this involves stacks of printed gardening catalogues (and no, it's just not the same online, though I do request them by email), a pen, Post-It notes, and a graph paper pad filched from Tom.

This recent Sioux City Journal newspaper article includes a number of good US seed and plant houses to contact for catalogues.

And here's an online Guide to Gardening by Mail, Mail Order Gardening, and Catalogs, from DavesGarden.com. Very, very thorough, and includes Canadian seed and plant companies as well; there's a nifty "Browse by North American State/Province" feature.

Canadian Gardening magazine has its 2007 list online.

I'll leave the last word to Katharine S. White, E.B. White's wife, an editor at The New Yorker, and ardent and opinionated gardener. After she retired from her editing duties, in the late 1950s, she began a series of garden pieces for the magazine. More than a few columns were reviews seed and nursery catalogues, which Mrs. White considered as seriously as any other American literature. After Mrs. White's death in 1977, her husband collected them into a delightful volume, Onward and Upward in the Garden. From her first piece, dated March 1, 1958,

For gardeners this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogues, making lists for their seed and plant orders, and dreaming their dreams. It is the season, too, when the amateur gardener like myself marvels or grumbles at the achievements of the hybridizers and frets over the idiosyncrasies of the editors and writers who get up the catalogues. They are as individualistic -- these editors and writers -- as any Faulkner or Hemingway, and they can be just as frustrating or rewarding. They have an audience equal to the most popular novelist's, and a handful of them are stylists of some note. Even the catalogues with which no man can be associated seem to have personalities of their own.

Before we examine the writers and editors, let us consider the hybridizers, and the horticulturists in general. Their slogan is not only "Bigger and Better" but "Change" -- change for the sake of change, it seems. Say you have a nice flower like the zinnia -- clean-cut, of interesting, positive form, with formal petals that are so neatly and cunningly put together, and with colors so subtle yet clear, that they have always been the delight of the still-life artist. Then look at the W. Atlee Burpee and the Joseph Harris Company catalogues and see what the seedsmen are doing to zinnias. Burpee, this year, devotes its inside front cover to full-color pictures of its Giant Hybrid Zinnias, which look exactly like great shaggy chrysanthemums. Now, I like chrysanthemums, but why should zinnias be made to look like them?

By the way, any Katharine White fans who have despaired of ever reading more of her garden writings would be very happy with Emily Herring Wilson's 2003 compilation, Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters, Katharine S. White & Elizabeth Lawrence, the latter a talented and prolific garden writer.

Poetry Friday: Poems for late December

An old favorite, and something new, at least to the blog.

I Heard a Bird Sing
by Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember:

"We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,"
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.


Time, You Old Gypsy Man
by Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962)

Time, you old gypsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

All things I'll give you
Will you be my guest:
Bells for your jennet
Of silver the best;
Goldsmiths shall beat you
A great golden ring;
Peacocks shall bow to you;
Little boys sing.
Oh, and sweet girls will
Festoon you with may.
Time, you old gypsy,
Why hasten away?

Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning, and in the crush
Under Paul's dome;
Under Paul's dial
You tighten your rein --
Only a moment,
And off once again;
Off to some city
Now blind in the womb,
Off to another
Ere that's in the tomb.

Time, you old gypsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

* * *

The last Poetry Friday roundup for 2007, and some Ogden Nash, can be found over at MsMac's Check It Out.

With get well wishes for MsMac, and wishes for a happy and healthy New Year to all, from Farm School!

Not too contemporary, I hope

My father sent me this article from last weekend's Telegraph, from which this excerpt:

Paddington Bear is to face his most terrifying adventure yet; a police interrogation over his immigration status.

A new Paddington novel, released to mark the 50th anniversary of his debut, is to be published next June.

Famously, the young bear was a stowaway on a ship from Peru; and, lacking the appropriate identity papers, he is arrested and interviewed by the police about his right to stay in England.

Michael Bond's Paddington books have sold more than 30 million copies in 30 languages since the marmalade-loving ursine first appeared in A Bear Called Paddington, half a century ago. However, this will be the first new novel since Paddington Takes The Test in 1979.

It is understood that Mr Bond, now 83, was reluctant to write a new novel without first settling on a storyline that updated the Paddington oeuvre into a strong contemporary setting.

Canadians in particular might be forgiven for being rather pessimistic about the prospect of Paddington in a strong contemporary setting, which lately has come to mean fatal Tasering at the airport.

Safe travels, Paddington.

Joyful influences: More thoughts on poetry and literature for children

this time from Willa at everywakinghour in this post (I'm still catching up on my blog reading as you can tell). Some of the highlights, but go read the entire piece:

Children aren’t born knowing what we consider “accessible” to them. They find it out based on their experience of what’s around them, what we let them have access to and what they make of it with their own minds and hearts. Sometimes adults can expect both less and more of the child than he is capable of. They can give him material that Charlotte Mason would call “twaddle” and then expect him to be able to work with it on a level more suitable of an older student. A lot of teaching errors come from one or both of these mistakes.

and

Probably the bottom line is that children aren’t dumb. They are as intelligent as we are, but their intelligence works through their hands and senses and creativity. So we don’t have to dumb down things to make them accessible. Perhaps we think that letting them explore with their hands and imaginations, and “play” with the experience, is dumbing down, but that’s just because adults have a limited idea of what intelligence is.

Lovely to read about Willa's daughter, now a teenager: "Obviously she wasn’t [at age six] comprehending the full story but Shakespeare and Tolkien have continued to be big and joyful influences on her life."

Poetry Friday: A magical thing and sweet to remember

I Heard a Bird Sing
by Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember:

"We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,"
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.

Unplanned blog holiday

Last Wednesday thanks to small and very remorseful child who shall remain nameless, my laptop developed water on the brain....

Can get online and fetch email but keyboard is kaput so can only cut and paste like ransom note. veryveryvery tedious. Can't be fixed, need new computer, but that means a trip to big city so who knows when. So haiku and fibs and archy-the-cockroach-lowercase and Tarzan-speak order of the day. So bye for now ;-)

veryveryvery cold snowy and windy since last Weds too, near minus forty, icy roads, travel even to town dangerous. ah, home.

Changing with the times,

or, this is when I start to think about home schooling them through university.

Either that or inventing some small canteen, maybe with a nice college logo, that would be more hygienic to carry off to the washroom (that's the bathroom for you Yanks).