Rebecca Christian

Are You Going to Scarborough Fair? All About Edible Herbs

By Rebecca Christian

I wish I liked to weed as much as I like to read; it would improve my garden much more than reading about gardening, which I’ve been doing lately thanks to several books that have floated into my ken.

One is The Beginner’s Guide to Edible Herbs: 26 Herbs Everyone Should Grow & Enjoy. Bit sweeping, that subtitle–I suspect Paris Hilton would rather prance around with her dressed-up chihuahua than transplant hyssop after all danger of frost has passed. Still,  one prefers an excess of enthusiasm in a writer to the drear of a dutiful tone, and  Charles W.G. Smith is nothing if not enthusiastic about herbs. “Experiment!” he enjoins herb growers who might feel timid about branching out beyond basil and parsley for pesto, “You’ll be amazed by the pesto possibilities!”

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Word Nerd: H is for Hyperbole

By Rebecca Christian

Hyperbole is exaggeration for effect, and I, for one, adore it. Okay maybe that’s hyperbolic, but I do like it a lot; once after I delivered a eulogy for a funeral, I was told by one mourner that I did such a good job of accentuating the positive, eliminating the negative and not messing with Mr. In-Between, she didn’t even recognize  the deceased.

The cover for The Andrews Sisters “Accentuate the Positive” record; Al Jarreau, Chet Baker, and Bing Crosby are among the many who have memorably covered this song.

Here’s an example of hyperbole from the Trad Home article “Rediscovering a Classic,” May 2008 (note the words in bold):

“When Lynn and Frank Ehret moved to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood just a little more than two years ago, they began with the best; a stately 1903 home by architect Albert Farr, who once designed a home for writer Jack London and whose addresses are coveted for their enduring beauty and their many heart-stopping details.”

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Sun-loving Impatiens

By Rebecca Christian

Yes,  you read that headline right. Impatiens with their whimsical names — Busy Lizzie and Patient Lucy — have long been known as sturdy shade-lovers that bring brilliant color to yards that are so sun-deprived they’re hopeless for just about anything else but hostas. Often you’ll see impatiens planted in a gay ring around the base of a beautiful old tree or in mass plantings, providing a carpet of color on the grounds of corporations.

Now Sakata has come out with SunPatiens, which the company bills as something new under the sun. These hardy little plants will root in two weeks versus the usual four. SunPatiens will thrive even in the most brutal sun and keep right on coloring your world until hard frost. If you neglect them and let them get parched, they may look half-dead, but just revive ‘em with a pint, as the Irish say — though of water, not of ale. They’ll perk up right away. You can get the spreading type, like this:

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Outdoor Furniture Grows Up

By Rebecca Christian

Last week I had the pleasure of trying out a chair brought in by people from Gloster, the company that makes tony outdoor furniture. It was so sink-down living room comfy that it was perfectly dreadful to return to my desk with its little grey number on casters, no matter how ergonomically correct. The havana armchair

The Havana Armchair

I tried was scarily upholstered in white,  but I was assured by a Gloster rep in an adorable British accent that spillage (I was imagining myself with a nice glass of Pinot Noir and Christopher Hitchens’ saucy new memoir) is a non-issue, it wipes off so well. The Gloster folks also told us modular furniture is coming back big time. But remembering some lean years in which I made do with an evilly stained, orphaned third of a modular couch that always looked like a lone piece of  jigsaw puzzle, I don’t know that a modular set is in my future.

Gloster was first known for its teak furniture, and that’s swell stuff, especially if you like tasteful restraint, but what really hit my hot button was the scoop nest.

The Bronze Scoop Nest

Think of all the middle-aged accouterments one of these babies could handle when you curl up in it: literary book, schlocky book, magazine, prescription blended bifocal sunglasses, sunscreen, wee drinkie, cellphone, legal pad and paper (in the unlikely event of pensive thoughts tumbling from cerebellum to page). I guess “pensive thoughts” is kind of redundant — nitpickers might insist it means thoughtful thoughts — but if I was as relaxed as I think one of these curvaceous little nests would make me, I would swat the nitpickers with my People magazine (gotta find out why Al and Tipper split) and tell them to sue me, wouldn’t you?

Word Nerd: Are you a GPS?

By Rebecca Christian

Thanks to the economy, technology and fashion, there are so many new words being created you’d have to be a “didiot” not to notice them. As a didiot myself, I assumed didiot means someone who’s an idiot with digital technology (that would be moi), but no: It is a hybrid of “damn” and “idiot.” A “yoot” sounds like either a Dr. Seuss character  or the way your cousin Vinny would pronounce “youth,” but instead it is a person young enough not to remember life before youtube.

Men were already suffering in the “mancession” – meaning disproportionately more men are unemployed due to the languishing of traditionally male trades like construction. Now they have to cope with the “Tiger effect,” too. That’s newly alert wives checking up on them through cellphone, GPS, and email records. And by the by, a GPS is not just a gizmo but also a driver that gives too many directions. I have just bought a GPS myself and love it, but wish that instead of the bossy female voice directing me this way and that, I could have mine programmed with Colin Firth telling me in his posh British accent, “Oops! This is a one-way, ducky!” or “Wait ‘til the light goes green, love.”

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have Colin Firth’s voice programmed into your GPS to give you directions, ducky?

We have the recession to thank for the lack of a “speeding cushion,” that is the five miles above the speed limit that a nice ossifer used to let you get by with; now more tickets are being written as cities and states try to rev up their revenues.  That  “incentifies” drivers to follow the limits. I’ve been seeing “incentify” a lot in the business world; it’s one of those conversions of a noun to a verb that drives traditionalists and grammarians crazy. I have come around to the belief that in language, change is inevitable and correctness rests mostly upon usage; it’s like a river because it is never the same twice.

From the travel industry comes the word “yotel,” very small but sometimes very fancy accommodations that originated in Japan, allowing people to experience luxury for less.  From fashion this spring comes “the shoe boot,” a warm weather version of the boot. For me, it conjures up a surprisingly tender  “All in the Family” episode in which Archie recalls how other kids called him “shoe bootie” because he was so poor he had to wear one shoe and one boot to school. If you remember that episode, too, kid, you’re no “yoot.”

A longer version of this post appeared originally in the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa.

Daytripping to Gardens

By Rebecca Christian

Just in time for planning your summer calendar comes a handy little compendium, the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Directory.

The Richard and Sandra Bergmann Garden in New Canaan, Connecticut

The book lists open dates from late March through early November for more than 350 private gardens in 21 states that are rarely open to the public. Tours are self-guided, which gives you plenty of flexibility. Examples include Red Mill Farm in Connecticut, where informal gardens set off an 1840s farmhouse and pre-revolutionary sawmill, and  Yusts’ Garden, a Tuscan-style villa with an Italian garden in the L.A. area.

The wind at your back, a gorgeous garden up ahead: Whee!

Gardens vary from grand ones on huge estates to intimate ones that occupy less than an acre, and the book is nicely organized so that you can visit gardens that are within easy driving distance of each other on the same date. Public gardens in each area are also listed so that you can round out a daytrip with them as well. An example is the John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden in Mill Neck, New York, a 50 year labor or love which blends Asian plants with the Long Island woodland that surrounds it.

You can order the book for $21.95 by going to www.opendaysprogram.org

Happy Earth Day

By Rebecca Christian

I’ve been waiting until Earth Day to tell you about the book, Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green From Traditional Japan. Filled with sketches and stories, the book itself physically radiates the sort of clean, fresh, calm approach to living it advocates. The author is New Orleans-born designer Azby Brown, who also wrote The Very Small Home and who is the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo. Read more

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches

By Rebecca Christian

How to Plant a Tree is a sweet paperback small enough to fit in the back pocket of your britches if you’re out a’wandering like Johnny Appleseed. It’s full of tree lore, and I especially liked the idea of trying to foretell summer weather through the charming if inaccurate means of which trees leaf out first (Oak before ash/ in for a splash/ Ash before oak/ in for a soak).

Whether you want to clone a deciduous, coppice a woodland, take a tree from an old house to a new one as a living souvenir,  grow a tree from seed, or deter overly attentive deer, my dear, Daniel Butler is your man. Mr. Butler, a former editor of the magazine for England’s Tree Council, has recently planted his own thousand-tree wood. (I wonder if it’s anything like Pooh’s Hundred-Acre Wood.)  As an aficionado of weeping willow trees — my sister and I used to make grass skirts of their whiplike shoots on hazy summer days — I loved learning that the willow (English major alert here) is said to have come to England via a parcel. When poet Alexander Pope discarded the apparently dead string, the first English weeping willow was born.

How about a tree for Mother’s Day?

Black, White and Read

By Rebecca Christian

The Chanel No. 5 perfume box. Cary Grant running, dapper in a suit, in North by Northwest. Typewriter keys. Newspapers. Timexes. Audrey in a LBD with pearls. And most of all, Boston terriers, who never need to dress up because they’re always wearing a tuxedo.

The common denominator is black and white, which is strikingly explored in a new book, Design in Black & White, by journalist/photographer Janelle McCulloch, who writes, “Now after a few years of being overshadowed by beiges, grays, and a vast palette of other dizzyingly chic colors, black and white are being revived again as increasing numbers of aesthetes realize just how eye-catching these impeccable tones can be.” The book is available at bookstores and online at www.imagespublishing.com

Here are some of my favorite images from the book:

Word Nerd: G is for Grammar

By Rebecca Christian

I saw an unintentionally funny response from one reader to another in the comments section of an online publication recently: “You don’t have any credibility because you don’t even use proper grammer.”

Hint: If you’re going to chastise someone for their grammar, you had better spill it korreckly.

It’s interesting that certain grammar “rules” are often cited that really never were part of standard English; mainly they’re holdovers from the way things were done in poor old dead Latin.

One such “rule” is that you should not end a sentence with a proposition. There’s a famous line attributed to Winston Churchill, allegedly writing  in response to an editor who cited this so-called rule to him: “This is the type of nonsense up with which I shall not put.” Now historical revisionists are claiming that Churchill never said that; next I suppose they’ll be saying pugs and babies don’t look like the jowly statesman. I say that if he didn’t say it, he should have.

Prepositions create relationships between other words, like “the day after tomorrow” or “somewhere over the rainbow.” Or as Dorothy Parker once put it in a naughty ditty:

I like to have a martini

Two at the very most

Three I’m under the table

Four I’m under the host

Dorothy Parker

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