And on with the carnival...

Welcome back to the Carnival. I didn't have time to post on Thursday, and stretching Carnival any longer would be pushing it, even for Milan. So we'll have all the rest of the nominations today.

In 2006, before I started blogging, I had great fun seeing the weird and wonderful colour combinations that arose in second generation pansies, which I'd grown from seeds saved the year before. Single or bi-colour plants like those in the photo had combined to give a riot of colours, with blotches and stripes everywhere. So it was great to receive Matron's nomination of this post by Daughter of the Soil on her Purple Pea Project - a great explanation of genetics and the problems of seed saving.

Lots of nominations focused on posts with great photos. Have a look at this archive from Nature Girl. Ladyluz nominated the first post on the page, but I was struck by some of the photos further down. So scroll and enjoy!

Gardenmoma also went for photos, nominating a post from Bliss in the Netherlands from last December. If like me you're a sucker for ice-storm photos, check this one out.

One of my favourite poems is WB Yeat's The Lake Isle of Innisfree. It starts :

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Jodi, in Nova Scotia, drew on the idea for her post The Bee-Loud Garden, nominated by Kris of Blithewold. Don't miss the photo of the lavatera.

My own nomination? In 2006 Sue of Lodge Lane Nursery won the BBC Gardener of the Year competition. She wasn't allowed to talk about it at the time, but once the programme was released she posted a blog that she'd kept day by day during the competition. It was winning the competition that allowed her to buy the nursery which she now runs and turn professional.

To read it properly, read the first post on the page first and then scroll down to the last - ie the earliest - and read up.

Shortly after I'd announced the idea of the Carnival, Angie of Gardens and Junk contacted me nominating a post by Andee, the Gardener in Chacala. Shortly afterwards, as many of you will know, Andee died. So I'd like to finish with the nomination for Growing Luffa Sponges in Chacala, a post that - as always - showed Andee's interest not only in plants but also in the people around her. Rest in peace Andee.

Read more...

2008 Garden Bloggers' Carnival

It’s carnival time – the period of feasting and fun preceding the forty days preceding Lent. The word carnival comes from the Latin – carne vale. Or in other words, Meat, goodbye ! Eat everything up quick, because from now until Easter it’s fasting and abstinence. Well - if you’re a Christian anyway. But I have to admit something. Lent may have started for you and carnival may be over – but for us in Milan, it hasn’t and isn’t. We carry on till Saturday.

The tradition dates back till 1485 when Milan was hit by an attack of the plague. For weeks the gates of the city were closed, no-one being allowed in or out – with obvious repercussions on the food supply. The epidemic passed and the city was reopened on Ash Wednesday - just when the already half-starved people should have been starting to fast. So the Archbishop of Milan asked the Pope for a special dispensation, and Milan was granted four extra days of carnevale. Somehow in the following years it never got changed back again ...

And so the Garden Bloggers’ Carnival starts today and will go on till Saturday. If you remember, I asked people to say thank you to the writers of blogs they’d particularly enjoyed by nominating one of their posts. So here we go with a chance to gorge yourself on some of the best posts from the gardening blog world...

One of the reasons I like organising these carnivals, is because I get to find out about blogs I’ve never heard of before. That happened when Kris of Blithewold nominated an post from Ledge and Gardens talking about garden design. The post nominated is about shape and plant choice, but when I went in to check that it was OK to post the link, what did I find but another post on the same topic – but this time dealing with colour. And what colour. If I was half so gifted visually, I’d have the best balcony in Southern Europe. Not to mention the superb condition of the plants. Oh well, back to fighting the red spider mite ...

Not all the posts nominated are new though. Sometimes one comes in which I’ve read and enjoyed before, and I’m grateful that someone has jogged my memory and sent me back to it – as happened when Carol of May Dreams Gardens nominated this post by Annie in Austin. It’s about mowing lawns, and makes a great case for doing it yourself rather than (I admit, like me when I’m in London) delegating it to some hapless member of your family. I conned my son for a year or so by looking grave and saying “Do you think you can do it OK?” in that “Mummy” tone which really means “I don’t think you’re old enough”. But once the novelty wore off and he got a bit bigger, he twigged. So then it was an appeal to my husband - Darling I’m so tired and I really must get on with deadheading the roses ... Annie thinks otherwise, and once she starts talking about her Dad, she’s got me convinced. Odd how so many of us women garden bloggers trace our love of gardening back to our dads.

Kris showed that she’s open minded about lawns though, by also nominating Blackswamp Girl who ripped out her front lawn to plant other things. In Britain where we have fences and hedges around the front garden, lawn or flowers are a matter of personal choice, but in the States where everything is open and the space between the houses and the roads therefore feels more communal, it seems to be a different matter. At the moment my house has a lawn at the front – but I suspect that if I actually lived there it wouldn’t last long. Why waste gardening space when I’m never going to sit there? The lawn is for the back. I start tut tutting when people pave the whole front garden over to park their cars there, but if I saw one of my neighbours had created the same front garden as Blackswamp Girl, I’d be envious.

That's enough for Day 1 - enjoy. But the carnival will be back on Thursday, and again on Saturday with more. So if you've been intending to send in a nomination but haven't got round to it - there's still time! See you on Thursday!

Acknowledgement

Thanks for the photo, provided under Creative Commons License via flickr.

Read more...

Comments and Carnivals

When we held the carnival last year, several people said they'd like another one - including a few who never got round to participating last time. One of the suggestions was that we hold it in the "real" carnival week, which I've just realised is really early this year - the first week in February. So we need to get on with it.

It would be boring to repeat the same format though - let's have a carnival with a difference. This time, instead of nominating one of your own posts, nominate a post from someone else's blog. Find a post you've really enjoyed - preferably not a very recent one - and send me the link. I'll publish the link itself (after checking with the other person that it's OK), together with a link to the blog of the nominator. You can send it, like last time, using the Comments box, but as Blogger has locked out a lot of people, I'll also give you an E-mail address. I'm not going to write it in E-mail format to avoid being picked up by spammers, so put the following all together into a continuous address, no capital letters and no spaces (but the hyphen stays), and substitute at for the usual symbol : Susan Swift at Business-Talk . IT

I may be wrong, but Blogger also seems to be playing havoc with my comments again, and I'm once more receiving E-mail notification of comments that never appear on my dashboard and comments appearing on the dashboard which never arrive via E-mail. No problem for those, but I'm worried that some aren't making it at all. So, if you've left a comment recently and I've not published it - I'm sorry, I never got it. Has anyone else noticed the same problem?

I came back from my Christmas holidays in Germany yesterday, ahead of the rest of my family as I have to work. And managed to leave the lead to connect the camera to the computer behind. So I can't download any new photos, sorry. You'll have to make do with clipart till next week ...

Read more...