This is one of my favorite photo's of Eva, bundling the garlic. One can almost smell it coming through the screen. Happy birthday to the Garlic Queen-slash-birthday pig! Hope you guys are able to take time out from farming long enough to eat something decadent and delicious.
These lovely Medieval flowers are always swoon-worthy in the margins of various Book of Hours, sometimes in medical texts, sometimes in gardening books. I can never get enough of looking at these beautiful images and feeling inspired, mostly to embroider May Morris-style textiles. They are helpful when writing historical fiction, for they reveal the unique
The Marginalia of Flowers Read More »
It is easy enough to get lost in Ann Siems paintings, a world of verdant gardens, ghostly lace, and beautiful folkloric portraits. Siems paintings employ different elements of 18th and 19th century art. Her subjects are stylized childhood figures, with pink-cheeked and smiling faces, that stare wide-eyed at the viewer. By contrast, the figures inhabit
Anne Siems: A World Of Wonder Read More »
*Please note that posters in the comments provide links to pages that no longer exist — sadly! Yale at one point removed the archive of images from public view. I am sitting at my desk transported by the digital images of the Voynich Manuscript, created sometime between the late 15th century and early 16th
The Voynich Manuscript: Magic, A Garden of Women, and a Secret Language Read More »
Sometimes it seems as if there is very little difference between the act of writing a novel and the act of building a garden. I love doing both and occasionally it is necessary to do one while ignoring the other. Thus I have been absent from the blog and my desk in general because I have
There’s Writing and Then There’s Gardening: Hard to Tell the Difference Sometimes Read More »
