Roundup

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Fellow book dealer Barbara Fisher at March House Books has just started a blog:  she has a lovely piece about finding a poem for a customer (you don't get that kind of service at Amazon), illustrated with some Margaret Tarrant drawings.  Margaret Tarrant isn't I must admit my first choice of illustrator, but I do wonder quite what fate awaits the child at the beginning of the post.  Innocent watery splashes up his lovely clean socks, a Dawn French-esque disappearance or something else entirely?

Susanna Forrest writes about hunting horses (something I have been thinking about lately as I read Elaine Walker's Horse, which mentions the disappearance of the horse from North America some centuries before they were re-introduced by the Spanish.  Were they eaten to extinction?)

Piccalilli Pie has a gorgeous post on the Bushtit - what we in the UK call by the technical term of LBB (Little Brown Bird).

Speaking of Roundup, for years I have resisted the siren call of the garden chemical, but now the forest of nettles and other weeds I cannot name but know only too well by their complete refusal to die and remarkable ability to sprout again from nothing that I can see have defeated me, and I have resorted to bunging glyphosate on the path into the vegetable garden.  And the dandelions in the gravel path.

Is this a slippery slope?  Any pro-nettle activists need not despair - we have an "official" nettle patch in the field, which is there for the butterflies.  Owing to a complete communication failure between me and the chap who tops the field, the nettles got topped last year but they do not seem to mind.  Just hope there will be some butterflies to use them.

Comments

Barbara said…
‘a Dawn French-esque disappearance’ --
I hadn’t even considered that but the more I think about it the more certain I am it will happen!!
10 May 2011 at 08:59
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