A Fun Outing

My daughter has been sick with a really nasty ear infection and cold virus for over a week. She was going stir-crazy from being cooped up and wanted to get out of the house today. She and I love to go to Barnes and Noble to browse over the magazines and books and get a drink from their, sort of but not really, Starbucks. That was her getting-out place of choice today, and of course, I happily agreed.

We kind of lost track of the time and spent four enjoyable hours there today. I looked at almost all of the gardening magazines and a few gardening books. One of the books I looked at was, Living in the Garden Home by P. Allen Smith. The photography in this book is absolutely stunning. So many of the gardening books, magazines and even the seed catalogs and seed packages have poor quality pictures. As an example:


This is the seed package for Bee Balm that I purchased a few days ago. If I was just going by the picture on the package, I personally wouldn't purchase it. In fact, I never had before, it just doesn't appeal to me. What did appeal to me this year was the fact that it attracts hummingbirds and that is my goal. I've since looked at pictures of Bee Balm on the Internet and there are some really great pictures, much more appealing than what is on this package.

In a lot of garden related publications it's hard for me to really tell what the flowers and plants actually look like, the colors are usually dull and flat and the pictures are not crisp and clear. There have been numerous times when I've seen a stunning picture of a fabulous flower on a garden blog and I think that I've never seen that particular one before, when in reality I more than likely have since I own over fifty gardening books and plant encyclopedias, and I'm always checking out others from the library. I also get several seed and plant catalogs and I look at them many times. Not to mention the garden books and and magazines I peruse on my frequent trips to B and N. It's just usually the pictures in most publications are unremarkable and don't make much of an impression on me so I focus on what is more familiar. I obviously am a very visually oriented person, so good quality pictures are very important to me.

Anyway, back to Living in the Home Garden, I really enjoyed this book. P. Allen Smith does a beautiful job with making the most of his prolific garden through every season. There are fifty projects in the book, many of which are seasonal centerpieces and arrangements. For those of you who love to bring the outdoors in with bouquets from the garden, this book is a must see. As I said, the photography is stunning and there is a glossy, colorful, magnificently clear, feast for the eyes on every page.

Now to change the subject, I talked with my mom today, and they actually had snow in Alabama!
This is a rare occurrence. One thing I'm quite sure of, there was no milk or bread to be had in the stores today. You were out of luck if you didn't rush out yesterday and stock up. Down south, when they mention the S word, the milk and bread fly out of the stores like crazy.

My dad is always teasing me about keeping the snow up here, he hates cold weather and snow. So it was quite funny to me that he had snow today and I didn't, (we won't mention the freezing, below zero cold to him though).