Dchammers

“Welcome here too, in this ordinary patch of Connecticut soil, will be the honey-green fleshed Jenny Lind, beloved musk melon of the 19th century, cast aside by commerce just because it is said that her rind wasn’t tough enough to travel… Incredible don’t you think, to have two such different women of the 19th century commemorated in one garden, the wife of Josephine’s gardener, certainly one of history’s faceless and forgotten, and then the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, perhaps the most famous woman of her time, soprano idolized on both sides of the Atlantic, the century’s Madonna. It is said that her beauty and coloratura set millions to swooning. Come July when those melons start to swell I will be thinking of her, and of her bosom, I guess, for why else would someone name a melon after a sex-symbol?”
― Michael pollan

“Wealth is constantly being created and destroyed in the garden, but the accounts never balance for very long. A shortage of nutrients develops in this sector, a surplus in that one. The value of water fluctuates wildly. Who could hope to orchestrate, much less master so boisterous an assembly of the self-interested. The Gardner’s lot is to try and get what he wants from his plants while they go heedlessly about getting what they want. At the risk of s training the metaphor, think of the gardener as something like the chairman of the Federal Reserve, powerful certainly, but far from omnipotent. The best he can hope to do is smooth out the peaks and valleys of his garden’s cycles, restrain the lythrum’s rampant growth, stimulate a depressed campanula, channel the territorial greed of artemisia silver king. The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.”
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

“Lack of attention from Daddy made me think less of me and not less of him.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees

“The Beast was the feeling that I was never good enough or loved enough, the persistent fear that I would forever end up trivial second best to my beautiful sisters, Lucy and Joey. The Beast was self-consciousness, fear and loneliness inside a house run by a mother and a father who only occasionally took their roles as parents seriously. Then and forever, the Beast was my envious feelings about everything I worried about not being. The Beast was and is whatever feels insurmountable in the moment. Its key words are “enough,” “you should,” “why can’t you?” with me falling short and ashamed and exposed every single time. I’m sure everybody has their version of their own Beast, but this is my book.”
― Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees