When we read Galway Kinnell’s poetry, we often come back to one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ odd phrases: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. Both poets live in a “world charged“, and both find great joy in the sensuous feel of words. Here’s Galway Kinnell at his most sensuous — and seemingly having enormous fun:
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched or broughamed,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry eating in late September.
Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poems
For more on Galway Kinnell (& Gerard Manley Hopkins), here’s a few volumes from the Land Library’s poetry shelves!
A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, Strong is Your Hold by Galway Kinnell, Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
grafting: the practice of physically joining parts of two individual plants, as with stock and scion, so that they will form a union and grow together.
I was a youngster when I joined our next door neighbor as he grafted a new apple variety to one of his well-established trees. I was dumbfounded, and still am by this age-old horticultural practice. Grafting is usually done in the spring, just before growth gets underway.
An ambitious weekend project? But first check out the books above. R.J. Garner’s The Grafter’s Handbook has been a classic for many years, and has just been released in a revised 6th edition.
An easier beginning might be Larry Southwick’s Grafting Fruit Trees (also pictured above), part of Storey’s slim but useful Country Wisdom Bulletin series.
But don’t be put off by Garner’s textbook-like appearance:
The Grafter’s Handbook is a must-have on any fruit grower’s shelf! Meanwhile, take a look at this excellent, clear-headed approach to grafting:
The grafting of fruit trees is one of the oldest of recorded horticultural practices. The Romans developed and used several grafting techniques still in use today. Early texts, cautioned that the Japanese plum could be successfully grafted onto a peach, but not vice versa.
An age-old practice, ready for the next generation:
“The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.” — Carlos Fuentes
Good news! The Land Library continues to work toward opening a Urban Homestead Library in inner-city Denver, along with our second Kids and Educators Nature Library. We’ve been devoting more and more of our resources to find some of the best urban nature books available. These books are wonderful tools, and a powerful remedy for ever taking your home town for granted!
Books such as these, that help you learn about:
BIRDS, BEES…
AND TREES!
NEW NEIGHBORS…
FOOD…
and PLENTY OF FUN PLACES TO EXPLORE!
For the rest of this month, we’ll be featuring many more books on nature in the city — all leading up to the April 27th Colorado premiere of the award-winning film The Legend of Pale Male:
The Land Library is proud to be a co-sponsor of this benefit screening for The Bloomsbury Review, a national literary treasure that has been celebrating and promoting great writing since 1980. We’ll be celebrating two legends that night — The Bloomsbury Review, as it launches into its next chapter, and Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk of Central Park, now courting his eighth mate somewhere over midtown Manhattan!
WHEN & WHERE: Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm at Denver’s Montview Presbyterian Church
For more information on the April 27th premiere, call 303-455-3123, or 800-783-3338, or visit The Bloomsbury Review website!
Well, if you don’t speak French, no worries — read on! Recently, a Land Library friend from Quebec donated one of the most remarkable books on bees and beekeeping that we have ever seen. Eric Tourneret’s Le Peuple des Abeilles will always have an honored place on the Land Library’s shelves!
The text may be in French, but Tourneret’s photographs speak volumes. Many of the photos give such an upclose view of the bee’s world that you’d swear Tourneret strapped cameras to the backs of worker bees:
A steady stream of incoming bees, with pollen baskets full.
In some ways our personal inability to read the text liberated us to focus on the incredible patterns of another world:
Eric Tourneret also turns his lens on an equally fascinating creature: the beekeeper:
Le Peuple des Abeilles tells the tale of beekeepers employing both modern and traditional techniques. There are wonderful photo-essays on the capture of wild swarms, and the never-say-die efforts of urban beekeepers — including a few atop the Paris Opera House!
Eric Tourneret has seen a hidden world through his lens, and we’re happy he shared it:
If you don’t speak French, or if you someday hope to speak Bee, you’ll really enjoy this short clip!
Someday we hope a publisher issues an English translation of Le Peuple des Abeilles — but then again, we loved the visual odyssey we’ve been on, ever since Eric Tourneret’s classic book arrived from our generous friend in Quebec!
One of the first pieces the Land Library ever posted was on the great French entomologist, J. Henri Fabre. We have no doubt that he would have loved Le Peuple des Abeilles as much as we do:
A couple of years ago, the Rocky Mountain Land Series was lucky enough to host Gary Lincoff for his authoritative (and extremely fun) book, The Complete Mushroom Hunter. In his latest book, The Joy of Foraging, Lincoff takes on the entire plant kingdom. This is a wonderfully illustrated handbook, and Gary’s enthusiasm is certainly infectious. He’ll have you searching out nuts, wild fruits, edible greens — and even seaweeds. Along the way, you’ll learn much more about the place where you live.
That’s exactly what happened to John Lewis-Stempel. Looking around his English farm he saw a trout flash in the brook, mushrooms sprinkled across his fields, and a squirrel eating hazelnuts. That led him to think, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could live on what nature provides for free? The result is one of the most unusual and well-written books we’ve read in quite sometime: The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food (also pictured above).
Here’s John Lewis-Stempel on the humble hazelnut: ” There is no sensible reason for me to be out at eleven at night, shining a torch up into the leaves and incipient catkins, gathering hazelnuts. Whatever is left on these few last trees will remain till first light, when I will have to come back anyway with a shepherd’s crook to pull down the high branches, an exercise impossible to combine with torch-holding. I am picking solely to do something to satisfy a squirrel-like urge to store up for the oncoming winter….
Hazelnuts are more amenable to the jaw when roasted, when they become starchy, like semolina. Roasted hazelnuts can also be pressed for oil. The process is laborious and the amount of pale amber oil that can be obtained from a pound of nuts is to be measured in parts of a teaspoon. Hazelnut oil is precious. Outside of duck fat, it is the only cooking oil I can obtain from the land.”
Here’s two more books on the art of feeding free!
Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, Langdon Cook’s foraging tale from the Pacific Northwest, and A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants by Luigi Ballerini.
As for urban foraging, we’ve been really inspired by the work of this group:
The London Orchard Project plants new community orchards, rejuvenates neglected ones, and (in one of their strokes of sheer genius), they map existing London fruit trees, all ripe for foraging:
For more on foraging in the wild, here’s one of our all-time favorite past posts:
“Gene Kritsky’s charming book is like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition for honey bees. For over 10,000 years, humans have tried to design accommodations for the world’s most useful insect that not only take into account the bees’ remarkably sophisticated behavior but also allow human landlords to help themselves to the products of their industry. Engagingly written and gorgeously illustrated, this book offers a uniquely entertaining and thought-provoking perspective on the longstanding partnership between honey bees and humans.” — May Berenbaum, author of Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs.
Gene Kritsky’s The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture traces the evolution of hive design from ancient Egypt to the present. Each technological advance is noted and copiously illustrated — from hollowed out log hives and mud daubed cylinders, to the straw skep (in use for over 1,500 years) and Lorenzo Langstroth’s breakthrough innovation: the movable frame hive (pictured below). Even Christopher Wren (architect of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral) came up with his own hive design!
The books and manuals of bee culture are many. Here’s three authoritative tomes from the Land Library’s shelves:
Langstroth’s Hive and the Honey-Bee by L.L. Langstroth, The Hive and the Honey Bee, Dadant & Sons, Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture by Ross Conrad
Gene Kritsky sees no end to innovation when it comes to bee culture:
“Today, honey bees are in trouble. These valuable insects, so critical to $16 billion worth of food production, are suffering from mites, diseases, the large-scale use of pesticides, and Colony Collapse Disorder. The history of beekeeping may provide clues that could help beekeepers and researchers as they struggle to save honey bee populations. Beekeepers will have to build upon this history of innovation, of successes and failures, or art and science, if they want to save not just an industry, but a way of life.“
We love this film! The Apple Pushers is an exuberant, life-affirming documentary that takes on some of the most urgent issues of our day — namely food justice, obesity, and immigration. All these concerns are closely related, as writer and director Mary Mazzio so artfully shows.
New York City, like every metropolitan area across the country, was faced with food deserts throughout the city — neighborhoods where finding a red ripe apple was a challenge, but where fast-food reigned and obesity rates soared. There isn’t a single fix for this problem, but here’s one we love: flood those food deserts with over a thousand street vendor carts, and bring fresh fruit and vegetables to neighborhoods in need.
For more on The Apple Pushers, be sure to check out their very informative website!
And here’s two more excellent books on the urban food movement!
Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty by Mark Winnie (a book we keep going back to, again and again), along with Will Allen’s The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities, the subject of a recent Land Library post, Greening the Food Desert.
We posted this piece back on May 25th. In the midst of harvest season, and at the end of a hard-fought campaign, we wanted to take another glimpse at Michelle Obama’s new book!
We were prepared to not like this book, thinking it might be a photo-rich, thin-on-substance look at kitchen gardens and healthy food. Well, were we ever wrong! A preview copy of Michelle Obama’s first book just came across our desk, and we’ve spent the morning paging through it. American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America is definitely photo-rich (the images are wonderful, especially the ones with visiting schoolkids), but this book goes into impressive detail chronicling the history of kitchen gardens in America, and tells scores of inspiring stories about contemporary backyard, school and community gardens across the country.
The White House Kitchen Garden is a very visible piece to a larger national effort. In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched Let’s Move!, a nationwide initiative to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity by bringing healthier food into schools and encouraging kids to get outside, and be more active.
American Grown hits the bookstore shelves on Tuesday, May 29th. Spend a glorious Memorial Day weekend planting your own seeds outside, but find time to watch these fun film clips of the White House Kitchen Garden, from its first planting in 2009, through all the subsequent harvests. Then, on Tuesday, storm your local bookstore for a copy of this wonderful book!
There’s so much good work being done, and so much more to do. The Land Library hopes to establish it’s second Kids Nature Library, this time in inner-city Denver. And we have more than enough books to launch a truly unique Urban Homestead Library for Denver families, gardeners, urban farmers, beekeepers, and the like. Help us make it happen!
For more on White House food initiatives, check out this website with a name you won’t want to forget!
“Land designated for use as allotments was usually simply land which did not find a more profitable use. It was seldom chosen for its horticultural potential, though of course the labour of the cultivators and their manuring of the soil have improved it over the years. For the sites were usually just the spaces left over, behind the houses or factories, limited in access from roads, or in the floodplains of rivers, or enclosed by the sweeping curves of railway lines.” — David Crouch, author of The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture
Long before community gardens began to pop up across America, there was the allotment. More than two hundred years ago, England began a social experiment, one whose goal was to give the landless laborer the means to provide for himself. And so, the allotment movement was born.
World War II gave new urgency to the movement as Britain sought to achieve self-sufficiency for the uncertain struggle ahead. Britain’s famous Dig for Victory campaign was launched, as seasoned gardeners and raw novices alike were recruited into a new allotment army.
Garden historian Twigs Way has written a fascinating history of those years, Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain (co-authored by Mike Brown), full of history, stories, photographs, and the rich imagery from the entire Dig for Victory campaign.
Twigs Way has also written a second volume, Allotments (pictured above), a very entertaining history of the allotment movement over the centuries.
Little by little, the Land Library has built up one of our favorite sub-sections devoted to a particular subject — books focused on allotments & community gardens across the globe. Here’s just a few of those volumes:
Allotment & Garden Guide: A Monthly Guide to Better Wartime Gardening, Twig Way’s annotated reprint of the monthly guides published by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture. As in her other books, Twigs has added many wartime graphics and posters, including the most iconic image of them all, the foot & spade Dig for Victory poster (pictured above).
Digger’s Diary: Tales from the Allotment, V. Osborne’s entries, originally printed in The Daily Telegraph, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture by David Crouch and Colin Ward (an indispensable and fun-to-read guide), and City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America by Laura J. Lawson
Following World War II, allotments saw Britain through the many years of austerity that followed. More recently, there has been yet another home-grown renaissance spurred on by the organic and grow-local movements. Allotments are alive, well, and here to stay — on either side of the Atlantic!
“Making space to look after, to show friendship and care — and other values not understood by the contemporary market place, allotment holding gives us a means to get out of our own home and join others in making good our future environment.” — David Crouch
And here’s a very fun film clip on a Royal visit to an allotment in Great Britain. It’s a fancier allotment than most, but we couldn’t pass it by, as it features Prince Charles — a longtime champion of both nature and vanishing rural ways:
Closer to home, for more on community gardens in the United States, here’s two good links:
“As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn’t think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past.” — Edna Lewis
Edna Lewis (1916-2006) had a remarkable career as a chef and writer of several best-selling cookbooks. Perhaps her most lasting contribution was her lifelong celebration of traditional southern cooking. She kept the tradition alive, and along the way inspired the next generation of cooks to make fresh magic from the local foods of the south.
Edna was born on a small farm in Freetown, Virginia — a farm that had been granted to Edna’s grandfather, a freed slave. Robbin Gourley’s lyrical tale (and her lush and vibrant watercolors) follows Edna and her family throughout the growing season. Gathered fruits, vegetables, and nuts quickly make their way to the family’s table, with the surplus canned for the winter ahead. Every family member is involved, but it’s Edna who shows an early genius for making fun recipes from the simple foods at hand. The New York Times had this to say about Edna Lewis’ upbringing: Growing, gathering and preparing food was more than just sustenance for the family; it was a form of entertainment. Without fancy cooking equipment, the family improvised — measuring baking powder on coins and cooking everything over wood.
It was Robbin Gourley’s wonderful kids book that inspired us to learn more about Edna Lewis, and to slowly gather her cookbooks for the Land Library. After all, if she could give so much to preserving a precious regional tradition, we wanted to reciprocate a tiny bit by keeping her work alive on our shelves!
Somewhere along the way, we came across this inspiring documentary, Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie: Keeping Traditions Alive, written, produced, and directed by Bailey Barash. There’s much more to Edna Lewis’ life than you might imagine. This is a wonderful film!
In 1995, Edna Lewis was awarded the first ever James Beard Living Legend Award, for her creative years in the kitchen, and for books such as these: In Pursuit of Flavor, and The Taste of Country Cooking, of which, Craig Claiborne wrote that it “may well be the most entertaining regional cookbook in America“.
Food traditions have long been a happy obsession at the Land Library. Here’s two of our favorites volumes:
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris, and The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge.
Edna Lewis was the co-founder of the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, a precursor to the Southern Foodways Alliance. For more on their ongoing work be sure to visit their website!
And for more on the great topic of food traditions, here are a few of our earlier posts!
