Day Lily ... Dwarf Rootstocks

Sonya … set off for St Petersburg with the intention of petitioning for an audience with the Tsar, so she could ask him personally for permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata. It was granted on the proviso that the story was only published as part of the multi-volume collected works that were less readily available to vulnerable younger readers. …

Sonya’s trip to St Petersburg was another nail in the coffin of the Tolstoys’ marriage. Tolstoy regarded the very idea of petitioning the Tsar as demeaning, and he wished for no profits to be made from his writing. … Unceasing arguments now led Tolstoy to make a decision to renounce all his property. … The arguments with Sonya continued when Tolstoy insisted she send to the press a letter announcing his renunciation of the copyright on his writings. It finally appeared in all of Russia’s major newspapers on 19 September 1891.

The whole experience of dividing up his estate reminded Tolstoy of a famous antecedent, and he told his children to go away and read King Lear. It was probably the only time in his life that he actually recommended Shakespeare, but he had clearly been ruminating on King Lear for a while.

[TOLSTOY: A RUSSIAN LIFE]

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Johannes Evangelista Purkinje [1787-1869] is remembered for many scientific findings including the Purkinje fibers in the heart … but for the evening garden the most important discovery was the understanding of the Purkinje phenomenon, the shift in the relative apparent brightness of red and green as compared to yellow and blue in dim light.

Only the cones in our eyes can distinguish color; the rods located within the periphery of the retina are colorblind. The rest of the eye can see blue and yellow while the fields for red and green are restricted to the eye’s center section. Purkinje demonstrated that in dim light the ability to see red and green disappears and we are left with blue and yellow plus black, white, and shades of gray. As the light continues to dim, yellow fades – though it seems to glow just before it passes from our sight – but our eyes are still capable of discerning brightness and can easily see white light. Finally only white light remains in the evening garden, and though studded with stars, the deep blue of the night sky has quickly changed to black.

[Peter Loewer, THE EVENING GARDEN]

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How, exactly, dwarf rootstocks work, is ‘not really known’ … ‘recent investigations’ have led some unnamed pomologists to suspect that the rootstocks may harbor ‘some kind of virus’, which is ‘probably latent’ …

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The DAY LILY is one of the oldest plants known to man. Cultivated thousands of years ago in China for its edible flowers, which are still considered a delicacy, Hemerocallis fulva may well have originated there as Linnaeus believed. It has been propagated by division for centuries, since it does not set seed. H. flava is equally ancient. It was familiar to the Egyptians and Romans and was included as a medicinal herb in the influential Materia Medica by … Dioscorides in the first century. Both these lily-asphodills, as they were then termed, reached England in the 1570s and were grown by Gerard and ‘also in the gardens of Herbarists, and lovers of fine and rare plants’.

In his Garden Book of 1659 the gentleman gardener Sir Thomas Hanmer noted that ‘we have only the Orenge, which is called the Day Lilly, continuing in flower but a day, and the Yellow’. … A hundred years later, these two day lilies were joined by a third, H. minor, from eastern Asia. As the epithet suggests, it is less tall than the others, about 10 to 18 inches high … H. minor was recognized as a separate species by Philip Miller in 1768. It is distinguished from H. flava by being smaller in every feature except the flower …

[VANISHING GARDEN]

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In that dustiest room of a great library where "pub. docs." are stored,

I unearthed a government report on forestry that gave, at last, a clear

idea of the lay of the land. And here was news. We are wont to think of

the South as a low country with sultry climate; yet its mountain chains

stretch uninterruptedly southwestward from Virginia to Alabama, 650

miles in an air line. They spread over parts of eight contiguous States,

and cover an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, or about

the same as that of the Alps. In short, the greatest mountain system of

eastern America is massed in our Southland. In its upper zone one sleeps

under blankets the year round.

In all the region north of Virginia and east of the Black Hills of

Dakota there is but one summit (Mount Washington, in New Hampshire) that

reaches 6,000 feet above sea level, and there are only a dozen others

that exceed 5,000 feet. By contrast, south of the Potomac there are

forty-six peaks, and forty-one miles of dividing ridges, that rise above

6,000 feet, besides 288 mountains and some 300 miles of divide that

stand more than 5,000 feet above the sea. In North Carolina alone the

mountains cover 6,000 square miles, with an AVERAGE elevation of 2,700

feet, and with twenty-one peaks that overtop Mount Washington.

I repeated to myself: "Why, then, so little known?" The Alps and the

Rockies, the Pyrennees and the Harz are more familiar to the American

people, in print and picture, if not by actual visit, than are the

Black, the Balsam, and the Great Smoky Mountains. It is true that summer

tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway, Linville and Highlands, passing

their time at modern hotels and motoring along a few macadamed roads,

but what do they see of the billowy wilderness that conceals most of the

native homes? Glimpses from afar. What do they learn of the real

mountaineer? Hearsay. For, mark you, nine-tenths of the Appalachian

population are a sequestered folk. The typical, the average mountain

man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways.

We read more and talk more about the Filipinos, see more of the Chinese

and the Syrians, than of these three million next-door Americans who are

of colonial ancestry and mostly of British stock. New York, we say, is a

cosmopolitan city; more Irish than in Dublin, more Germans than in

Munich, more Italians than in Rome, more Jews than in nine Jerusalems;

but how many New Yorkers ever saw a Southern mountaineer? I am sure that

a party of hillsmen fresh from the back settlements of the Unakas, if

dropped on the streets of any large city in the Union, and left to their

own guidance, would stir up more comment (and probably more trouble)

than would a similar body of whites from any other quarter of the earth;

and yet this same odd people is more purely bred from old American stock

than any other element of our population that occupies, by itself, so

great a territory.

[Horace Kephart, OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS]

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'T is pity learned virgins ever wed

With persons of no sort of education,

Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,

Grow tired of scientific conversation:

I don't choose to say much upon this head,

I 'm a plain man, and in a single station,

But--Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,

Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?

[Lord Byron]

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Secondly, for directions for the Countrey, it is not to be feared, but that men of good estates may doe well there; alwayes provided, that they goe wel accommodated with servants. In which I would not wish them to take over-many: tenne or twelve lusty servants being able to mannage an estate of two or three thousand pound. It is … the industry of the faithfull and diligent labourer, that enricheth the carefull Master; so that he that hath many dronish servants, shall soone be poore; and he that hath an industrious family, shall as soone be rich.

[NEW ENGLAND’S PROSPECT]

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Dear serviceberry2007,

1970s-era Men's Short-sleeved shirt -- 100% Cotton -- Made in USA! -- Unopened!

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Meat Magazine Compares the Humane Society to Hitler [Journalismism]

One rock solid rule of editorial writing is, if you're against something, you always want to find a way to compare it to Hitler. This works because people hate Hitler a lot—and, through the simple principle of transference, they will have an equal amount of hate for whichever thing you compare to Hitler. This is just a basic "trick of the trade" which cannot backfire.

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Rabbit at Rest

The bizarre and misguided critical assault on John Updike’s reputation.

By Katie Roiphe

Exactly three years after his death, it’s sad to see that John Updike has subtly fallen out of fashion, that he is left off best novels lists like the Modern Library’s, and that a faint sense of disapproval clings to his reputation, even as his immense talent is recognized.

In fact, his immense talent is part of what people seemed to find suspect about him in the years before his death. Critics and writers hold the fact that he writes beautiful sentences against him, as if his writing is too well crafted, too flamboyantly, extravagantly good. James Wood wrote a decade ago, “He is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys what a novelist must convey.” Here one has to wonder about that special handbook of “What a Novelist Must Convey,” and the rules and regulations contained therein.

And yet many other writers over the years have harbored the same odd objection. Take this critique in the New Republic (PDF): “He simply can’t pass up any opportunity to tap dance in prose.” The idea is that we should somehow distrust Updike because he is too good a writer. The word stylish in this way of thinking becomes a slur, as does the word beautiful.

The faux-democratic ideal of plain-spokenness, the sense that a novelist should not write too beautifully or he sacrifices some vaguely articulated, semi-mystical claim to honesty, is not a million miles away from the Sarah Palin-ish suspicion of east coast liberals, or a Harvard education, or people who know the dates of wars.

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Cynthia Nixon vs. Sinead: Who'd You Rather?

Allen West To Liberals: Get the Hell Out Of The U.S.

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The War On Vitamins

Dr. David Agus wages it in his new book The End of Illness. Brian Bethune summarizes:

Vitamin supplements would be bad enough if they were merely useless, he says. The money Americans spend yearly on vitamins—some $25 billion—is sorely needed elsewhere in the medical system. They aren’t getting much for their money now. Consider claims that vitamin D significantly cuts cancer risks and that three-quarters of the U.S. population had insufficient levels of it. For Agus, these results are found in not very high-grade studies; for one thing, he’s at a loss to understand how anyone can claim to have established the correct dose for appropriate D levels. The bone disease rickets is long gone and age-related fractures are not on the rise, meaning that by the only indications we have, the population has quite enough vitamin D.

Gregory Ferenstein details Agus' other prescriptions:

[W]e combat weight loss by driving to the gym to walk on a treadmill--and then return to hunch over laptops for hours on end. "Sitting at your desk is akin to smoking a cigarette," he says. Prolonged sitting, independent of physical exercise, he writes, "has been shown to have significant metabolic consequences," influencing everything from cholesterol levels to blood sugar.