Category: beauty
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Happy to be Canadian
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I hope all Canadians are enjoying our national holiday today. While we’re not highly demonstrative, we can be roused to defend our beautiful country, our freedoms, our culture. Here’s to being proud citizens of Canada! (photo of a Canadian flag fluttering in the breeze on a cruise of the 1000…
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Turning words into art
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“I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.” Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Swiss art curator, critic, and art historian; artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. What to do when your mother-in-law…
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A year in images that speak
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Writers notice a lot, and sometimes that manifests in photographs instead of words I know several writers who are also photographers, using another medium to convey ideas that have fascinated us, enchanted us, haunted us. We record images that inspire, remind us of something we want to use in our…
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Colour Me…??
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I don’t decorate with red and green for Christmas. Ironic, because red was my favourite colour when I was a child, and it is an attractive combination. I don’t mind it in small doses, but in large amounts it does tend to smack you in the eye. Is that holiday…
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Gather ye rose-buds
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Image: blush pink rose at the Niagara Falls Botanic Garden – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved Roses are beautiful. But like all things with great beauty, over the millennia they’ve incited great passions. If you think of them only as an expensive flower to give at Valentine’s, or send…
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Better travellers, better planet(s)
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I’ve always loved reading books that featured travel to exotic places. It was Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Death on the Nile, or more specifically the magnificently-filmed movie version in 1978, that cemented my desire to actually go to a country I’d been dreaming about since I was a child. Adding…
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What is biophilia and why is it trending
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My hubby and I don’t have a lot of natural green in our house, largely because I can’t grow anything. People who give me plants do so at their own risk, so to speak – I usually warn them that their gift probably won’t survive. I do have one plant…
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Interesting things people write about
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I subscribe to the Public Domain Review newsletter, and I regularly receive tidbits about publications that have recently been released into the Public Domain – i.e. the copyright on the material has passed. I find these tidbits fascinating, especially those from centuries ago. People had different perspectives on life back…
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1000 words in gardens
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There’s a well-worn saying that claims that a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s attributed to an advertising maxim coined in the 1920s, but Fred R. Barnard, who promoted the idea, said he took it from an old Chinese proverb. Whatever the case may be, photos can convey imagery…
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The mysterious Andean city in the sky, Tiwanaku
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At 12,500 feet in the Andes Mountains, the air is clear and cold. On a spring day, during the rainy season, clouds can blanket the sky and make the area look even more bleak. Yet, above the tree line, tucked into the Altiplano – a high, flat, barren plain that…