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March 30, 2006
Consciousness about small things
Every day starts with water. No, I don't mean that kind of water. I'm thinking of the first glass of water I drink, and the water I fill the kettle with for my first pot of tea. (I could be content with locally grown food, I think, except that I would still have to have tea, real tea, camellia sinensis.)
When I was first commissioned, in 1988, to write an ecology book, I knew virtually nothing about the subject and my friends were terrified for me. It didn't reassure them to know that I knew I knew very little; they couldn't imagine how I could educate myself enough to write a book. One of the first people to help me was an energy expert in London who invited me to his home to use his library. He offered me coffee, and after filling our cups he took a folded towel that was lying nearby and tucked it around the kettle. (In Britain, electric kettles are a way of life.) "It's a small thing," he said, "But it keeps the water hot for a couple of hours, until we want another cup." He was saving both water and energy, in one simple and habitual action.
To make a good cup of tea one needs freshly drawn water, so I rarely use water left in the kettle. But in the morning I find myself ducking and diving not to waste water. As I run the tap--an old habit, from London days when this was a precaution against leaded pipe joints--I catch the water in a watering can, and I toss the water used to warm the teapot in, too, and any dregs from the kettle. I feel a little silly doing this (it is, after all, a very small thing), but the ritual is a good way to remember the more important point, that I need to treat every material thing that passes through my hands as a resource.
And while the kettle is coming to a boil, I can water my houseplants, blooming geraniums and baby-powder-scented heliotrope.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 5:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2006
Sea to shining sea
Second day of spring garden clean-up. I found this a surprising activity when I moved to New England: raking in the springtime? But now I am an old-timer and know that the tide of winter recedes here slowly and leaving much debris behind. Branches and leaves, mostly, but also clumps of sod, thrown up by snow plows, and gravel drifts.
Tom, home from college for two weeks, has become a gardener, and Rachel is full of enthusiasm for seed planting. We were all out this weekend raking and scraping, filling in holes, and pulling out bittersweet (the most beautiful rampant vine we know). I tend to let stalks and leaves lie in the autumn, providing some protection in the flower beds and forming a thick mulch. But in the spring sunlight this can look messy. There is a bag of buckwheat hulls in the barn, which make a civilized and almost ladylike mulch, but I feel guilty about using so much of this bought-in garden material. David and Tom got the little chipping machine out and made mulch of lots of leaves right on the spot where it is needed, and I pulled apart a bale of hay to mulch my shade beds (mulch, by the way, holds moisture in the soil and keeps weeds from sprouting--it's good year round).
As I was tossing the silky clumps of hay I was thinking about garden supplies and global warming: how we can use wonderful natural materials, made from the waste of food processing (like the buckwheat hulls), but there is probably a high energy price tag. Local hay, I thought, isn't as attractive but it is cheap and available right here. Then I caught a whiff of ocean brine and it occurred to me that the silky hay I was spreading was something out of the ordinary. I checked with David, who had bought it to insulate the back of the house (it keeps our downstairs bathroom pipes from freezing). Yes, it's salt hay, something I'd heard of but never seen. Very nice to use, but not exactly the ecological choice I'd imagined, having travelled from the sea coast to the Berkshire Hills.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
Thai edition
This is an inside spread of the Thai edition: what a gorgeous, curvy
script!
Posted by Karen Christensen at 4:24 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2006
Experiments in progress
Only minutes after my last post, it started snowing. But it's warmed up now and there really is a feeling of spring in the air, shoots coming up, and even a patch of winter aconite under the trees at the back of the garden. I'm experimenting with photo systems, and herewith testing one of the things Flickr provides. Lots more going on as we get ready to announce the Cool Planet Guide.
| www.flickr.com |
Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:52 PM | Comments (0)
Flickr
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 5:38 AM | Comments (0)