Hollywood always gets gardens wrong (I’m talking to you, Maze Runner)

.... They look like thrift store paintings, or the work left forgotten in the art department hallways after the school term has ended. Ghastly. The statues are always hyper-realistic, created perhaps by casting someone’s face, or modeling them in CG. The result is dang creepy, and not at all historically accurate. As far as sketching goes, drawing styles change over time. It’s really interesting, actually, the evolution of line. I can identify the ro...

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Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

I figure by now that there are few of you, at least those of you who have de-cluttering on your radar, who don’t know that Marie Kondo, author of Tidying Up, has a new book: Spark Joy. We’ve been shamelessly selling it in our margins here on the blog for a good while, but I’m just now getting around to reviewing it. Of course, we wrote extensively about our journey with Tidying Up here last year. If you’ve read Tiding Up, your first question woul...

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Stencils as Garden Art

...ers alerted me to the far more impressive stencils of San Francisco street artist Jeremy Novy: Photo by Dawn Endico. Green Roof Grower Bruce was inspired by Novy’s work to make his own koi stencils on the sidewalk in front of his house. Now if enough of us adorn these edge spaces (in a neighborly fashion, of course) perhaps we’ll be able to reclaim our streets from the distant bureaucrats who hassle us over our parkway gardens. It’s precisely the...

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The Fine Art of Determining Peach Ripeness

How do you know when your peaces are ready to pick? For home growers it’s all about color. According to the University of Georgia, Ground color is the best field indicator of peach maturity. . . The ground color of a peach approaching maturity is light green. A break in color toward yellow is the first definite indication of maturity. Brightening of the red over-color of the skin is another, though less reliable, index of maturity. Red color is t...

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Picture Sundays: Best Van Art Ever

...This beautiful couple enjoys the eternal comforts of poetry and philosophy, along with an occasional fruit basket. There are what I think are golden psychic waves traveling between their heads, and the waves have small words floating among them. They are: soul, creativity, poetry, ideas, psyche, inspiration, express, concept, love, mind Photographed on Griffith Park Blvd. in Los Angeles. Save...

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