She Can't be Stopped!

I know, I know! "Two posts in one day?" I hear you (Jordan) shouting in disbelief at your computer. "Doesn't she have better things to do?" The answer is, undoubtedly, yes. I thought, however, that I would enlighten you about Italian Renaissance botany.

Random, non?

Well I'll explain a little first. Today in my class on Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso (The one I had a test in and I think I actually may have passed, by the by.) we had a guest lecturer for the second hour of class. His name was Prof. David Wilson of the University of Western Ontario. At least I think that was his name, I tuned out for the beginning of the lecture. He was lecturing about the science of botany in the Renaissance and how they speculated plants grew from ground that had previously been barren. So apparently they believed that the plants created a power that would get caught up in the wind that would then go around the world and then when it hit a barren area, it would uh 'rape' the ground and the wind and the plant would make a new plant grow, and then the wind would rape that plant and it would get pregnant, or something like that. Well, Sandro Boticelli (of the Birth of Venus) was a big fan of Dante and studied La Comedia for nearly 20 years. During that time he painted his very famous painting "La Primavera" (Spring time).



In Purgatorio, Canto 28, Dante and Virgil meet Matelda outside the gates of paradise, she prepares souls for their ascent to heaven. She is described as very beautiful, and with many flowers all over her. She tells the pilgrims about the creation of plants. In 'La Primavera' apparently Boticelli is painting the process of what we would call pollination in this part here:



It shows the wind, (on the far right, windy looking) attempting to rape Chlora. Chlora is the nymph of little green shoots. As you can see here:



There are vines growing out of her mouth. The Zephyr has impregnated her, and she is turning into Flora, the woman standing beside her:



Anyway, I just liked the image of the vines coming out of her mouth and I thought I should explain it instead of just posting it. Again, this is just the professors interpretation of the painting, there are many different interpretations. And I have a strong feeling that I absolutely butchered what he was lecturing to us about. Oh well, there are pretty pictures now.

Yours,

I wish procrastinating was my major.

Well, as nobody can tell because nobody is reading, I successfully managed to evade any work, yet again. Yesterday I cleaned my room up for the most part, but still couldn't find my copy of Dante's Purgatorio. So I did the dishes instead. WooHoo! My life is so exciting! This means, however, that I am at school at 9:00 am, and feel like stabbing myself in the eyes to stop the library from slowly draining out my soul. Trust me, it works.

I spoke with my parents about the garden, and they both thought it was a good Idea. Before we put anything on the roof (which will be in May anyway, so whatever) they want to put down a deck. Luckily for me you can just buy deck 'squares' from Ikea and piece them together like a big child with huge, expensive (ish) Lego. This weekend we're hoping to get up to a nursery to pick up some seeds for the various veg I'm hoping to plant. Thankfully, my grandmother on my father's side used to grow tomatoes every year, so my dad has some experience with their production.

I thought I should post about what happened to me today on the subway in light of my experience yesterday with the loveless jerk who hates dogs. Who hates dogs? How could anybody hate them? Anyway, i was trying to get on the subway at rush hour today, standing among the soulless business commuters in the morning. It is so creepy the way they stand and sway in unison, each clutching in desperation at their venti lattes and staring forward without any glimmer of life. You can always tell the people who are either a) well paid or b) new to their jobs, by the fact that they laugh and look around, trying to smile encouragingly at the mindless masses around them. So I'm standing on the platform with a horde of other people. The first subway comes by, and it is packed, so most people let it go by without many feelings of loss. So the next subway comes, and around the doors it is packed, but in the middle by the poles people are barely touching. This infuriates me to NO end. Everybody crowds around the doors, happy because they're on the subway without any thought to anybody else that could want to get on. Why should it matter? They're on, they're safe. So again, I let this subway go without getting on, my anger increasing. There was a guy waiting for the subway with me, he looked like he was maybe Amish, with a big hat and a beard, and the large black overcoat, but I couldn't be sure. Regardless, he looked very confused and worried about where he was and what was going on. The next subway comes, and sure enough this one has so much free space on it that there are even empty seats in the middle section. But again, people are crowding the entrance. By this time the feeling on the platform was one of desperation. It was as if we were on the Titanic and watching lifeboat after lifeboat pass by with only 8 people in them. People were crying, husbands saying goodbye to their wives, children crying out for parents and for some reason a String Quartet playing. Now, I'm not one to stand for such nonsense as there being available seats and nobody sitting, and I am a pretty miniature person, so I had no trouble telling people to move over and let me in. I have no qualms about calling people on their foolishness, so I also said, as politely as I could "Could everybody move over a bit so that that man may get on the subway? He's already missed 3 trains." There was a polite little shuffle, but no real movement. Everybody stared at me blankly, and I felt like a little deer in a herd of cows. The subway doors closed and the poor guy was left out there on the platform, yet again.

"Seriously? You're seriously not going to move for him?" I said, as the doors opened again. Again, they all stared at me blankly. So the doors closed and as we trudged off, he gave me this sort of half-hearted wave. I was standing in the middle, in disbelief. I had enough room that I could turn and there was an empty seat right next to me. So I left him to sink, and now am feeling such survivors guilt. The point of this is that I am starting to despair at the human race. What kind of world do we live in that people wont even try to move for somebody. What happened to sticking together, and helping others? It is truly depressing and is, I should think, a world I'm not sure I'm wanting to be a part of.

Well, that was depressing.

I thought I would post some pictures of what I am planning to plant in my garden, so that I can compare them to the straggly little excuses for plants that I will be growing. Here they are:

Lupines:



Bleeding Hearts:



Grape Hyacinths:



Foxgloves:



Flanders' Poppy:



English Lavender:



and Snapdragons:



All these images are from www.marthastewart.com, so I can't lay any claim to them.

Well, as usual, I've managed to while away nearly an hour. So I'll really get to work now (I promise).

Yours,

News Flash: Canada is cold.

Well, my second day and my second post.
In case all zero of you who are reading were wondering, I live in Canada. And Canada is cold. I even live in a major city, Toronto, (the majorist city, as far as I am concerned) and it is freezing. I thought these sorts of temperatures were supposed to only exist in the burbs and little farm towns where everybody gets frozen in in the winter and then somebody gets sick and the doctor has to make a heroic rescue effort to the persons house to save their little Jimmy from dying of sudden onset Pneumonia. So the whole point of this is to excuse myself from going to class. I had a 12 o'clock class today and I definitely did not go to it. I have a 2 o'clock class and it is looking more and more likely that I will not be going to it either. That is unless the temperature suddenly goes up 10 degrees. I should probably go to my second class, Italian Neorealist Cinema, and I have to go to my third class at 6pm, as a) it is a half course, b) my parents will be home by then and will be able to drive me to class and c) I should go to school, because KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! I should probably go to my Cinema Class as we're supposed to get our midterm marks back, but MY GOD it is cold.
I've been outside twice today. The first time I went at about 10:30 am, to take my dog out for a walk. When I got out the door she ran off on our super handy extendo leash and I contemplated just leaving her out there to freeze as I was so cold in the first few minutes that my finger tips ached. Unfortunately, I had some feeling of responsibility, as well as the fact that she had reached the end of the leash and was forcibly dragging me out into the street. As I was following after her, trying to gather up the slack on the leash, a man started walking down the sidewalk. Now, my dog is very friendly. She's only 5 and a half months old and feels that absolutely EVERYONE should be her friend and a member of the pack, whether it be a crabby old man walking down the street, a woman and her stroller or, in this case, a cranky drunkard. So Goose goes chasing after him and gets to his heels where she makes a little leap, not all the way up, just to his ankles. I immediately chastised her and apologized and the guy had the audacity to yell out "What the fuck, lady?" and then keep walking. I apologized again as a) I was in the wrong and should have kept better control over her and b) I am Canadian and it is a knee jerk reaction to apologize for everything. So he grumbles off and I take Goosey across the street to do her duty. As I'm walking away I just hear him say "Stupid Cunt".

I'm sorry, (See?) but who the hell kicked your mother in the stomach and made you such an asshole? My dog is clearly a puppy and so hasn't been entirely trained about jumping up yet. As well, I apologized about it; there's little else I could do. What was expected of me? Should I have run over and apologized profusely for the actions of my puppy? Anyway, I just ignored it and let him go off to his lonely life where nobody wants him, and enjoyed the adoration of my puppy in private.

I have a midterm on Dante's Purgatorio on Thursday and I am as prepared for this as a Grad Student is for the real world. I should be studying right now, but my blog is very much more interesting. To me, that is. As well, I seem to have misplaced my book and notes somewhere in the chaos that is my room. I have a hard time with the prof as well; he isn't very good. Well, he's not even a prof really, he's a doctoral student who teaches it. Last term we had the course coordinator as our prof and she was phenomenal. She was so excited to teach us about Dante and did it with enthusiasm and passion. She made all of us WANT to learn and so it was no surprise that I ended the class with an A- average. It doesn't help that the entire class is lectured in Italian, so understanding our heavily Roman accented teacher makes it difficult to take notes. He'll go on about something, then try to make some weak joke in Italian that we get, but don't really care about. So this awkward silence fills the class for a little while before he goes on telling us about some uninteresting part of Purgatorio that we learned by reading the annotated version of the book. The class feels like one reallly (two hour) long awkward conversation with the Italian guy you hooked up with one night and then had to talk to again in the morning and realized you had nothing in common with him and couldn't understand a word that was coming out of his gorgeous mouth.

Anyway, the point of this is that I plan to do something a little productive if I am not going to go to class: I will clean my room. Exciting, no? And then when I, hopefully, find my notes I'll study. See how good I am at procrastinating? I make it seem like I'm actually doing something, but I'm really not.

As this is supposed to be a Gardening blog, I should probably mention something about my planned garden. I worked last night at figuring out when I would have to plant things indoors, when I would have to transfer them outdoors and which plants I wanted to get. I plan to have a little vegetable garden as well as flowers for cutting. So far my planned flowers consist of: Lupines, Bleeding Hearts (Gold Heart), Grape Hyacinth, Foxgloves, Flanders' Poppy, English Lavender, Cinderella Snapdragons, Sweet Cluster Tomatoes, Beam's Yellow Pear Tomatoes, Beef Steak Tomatoes, Romaine Lettuce, Little Finger Carrots and Early Wonder Beets. Yeah, it's a lot. I'll probably only plant 1/3 of what I planned, but it'll be a start. The Bleeding Heart will be joining French Lilacs my mother and I are planning to plant in the front yard, as we have a huge tree that doesn't allow much sunlight. It seems most of my indoor planting will happen March 7th, and then I'll have a big planting day on May 16th. May 9th is the official day for last frost, but Canada sucks about weather, so I'm going to try and play it safe. As well, if I plant them too early then I'll have to spend May trying to support little seedlings in our terribly destructive climate. What this indoor planting date means, however, is that I need to get started pretty damn soon. Like, next week. Which means I need to buy indoor planters, seeds and other supplies, as well as get started working with my dad to build the large planters for outside on the roof.

Well, I seem to have managed to successfully evade work, yet again. So I'm off to stop procrastinating and actually do something other than lie in bed and read gossip blogs and talk on msn.

Yours,

In the Beginning...

Well, I heard somewhere that a bunch of people were hopping on the blogging bandwagon, and as I am never one to pass up integrating whole heartedly with the crowd, I decided to ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch -check it out. Maybe see wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-what's it all about.
So the purpose of my blog will be to follow my, likely failing, attempts at gardening. I have always loved gardening, but in an off-hand, oh-those-are-pretty-flowers, 'ya I don't mind getting dirty' sort of way. My mother is the superb gardener in my life. My father once said, in possibly the most romantic thing I have ever heard him say about my mother, that she has the uncanny ability to make things grow. My mother can take the most abandoned, neglected, almost-close-to-prostitution-because-it-is-so-desperate flower from the side of the road and transform it. This transformation could occur over a year or over a few days; regardless, it always flourishes. She has the touch, pure and simple. When I was sick a few years back she gave me two flowers; a dwarf Iris and a small rose bush. At first I reveled in taking care of them, and considered myself to be pretty awesome plant wise as I hadn't managed to a) kill them by dehydration, b) kill them by drowning or c) knock them off my window ledge three stories to the alley below. Of course, as soon as I began to get healthier I began to ignore them, and like any neglected child they naturally turned to hard drugs and crime. That is until my mother, Patron Saint of Forgotten Flowers, took them under her wing. The Iris prospered happily until it met a sad end at the paws of one of my cats. The rose? The one that had been a sickly little shrub without so much as a promise of a bloom? It proliferated into a large-ish (it was still a small plant) rose bush, covered with blooms. That little rose bush survived a few years on the window ledge of our kitchen during the winter, and the stone patio outside during the spring and summer. So now I feel like the hot girl in high-school who picked on the two nerds and now they're both media-execs or whatever and spend their lives living Ralph Lauren ads. Unfortunately, both these execs lost their lives at the cruel hands of pets; the Iris to the aformentioned cat and the rosebush to our new puppy, which pulled it off the ledge after years of having lived there.

My mother has an unbelievable gift with plants, I however, do not. I can only hope that my garden, which will be spread across my roof top for full sun-part shade plants and in my gardens for full shade - Part shade plants, will even make it off the ground. Right now it's just a shimmering little seed, germinating away in my mind. Whether it comes to fruition or not is entirely dependent on whether or not I get a) bored b) lazy or c) over worked. I really hope I can manage this garden, even if it ends up being just a few plants and not the jungle I'm imagining. The joy that flowers can bring in the day to day, whether it be fresh, cut, wild, or painted, is something that I can only compare to baby lambs, puppies and kittens; fascination, anticipation, beauty and overall splendor.. without the peeing everywhere.

So my little blogger friends (who I am sure do not exist as of yet), I leave you with a firm goodbye, and a pinch of hopefulness. Followed by a STRONG dash of skepticism.

Yours,