MLK Quote

MLK Quote

Nature's Inspiration Movie

http://www.flickspire.com/m/HealthierL433/NaturesInspiration -- Nature's Inspiration Movie: The photographs in this short video are from award-winning photographer, Ken Jenkins, and they are breathtaking. However, this video is much more than beautiful photographs! Peggy Anderson has compiled beautiful quotations from the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, and many others that truly capture the beauty of nature and solitude. Absolute must watch for nature lovers.

Monday, January 28, 2013

My First Garden Gift

Yeaaaaaaaaaaa......I can't describe in words how excited and happy I was to receive my first garden gift. Ever since I got into gardening, I or my husband were buying anything that were required for the garden - bird-houses, bird-feeders, garden-flags, fences, seeds, pots, mulches, garden soil and more garden soil!! But, on January 19, 2013 -- all that changed. My best friend gave me this pack of seeds which she brought all the way from Oregon.


I was so elated and felt over the moon that I kept on touching and playing with the packet, most of the time, during a twelve-hour journey from New Jersey to Kentucky! The packet is very poetic, which I am yet to find in any seed packet, and says, Oregon..an ever-changing landscape where lush green forests blanket the valleys, rugged coastlines dance with the sea, mighty rivers forge toward the ocean, magnificent waterfalls tumble toward the earth, and snow-capped peaks reach for the sky creating a breathtaking playground for a myriad of wildflowers. . The seeds are not taken from the wild; rather it is cultivated outside of the national parks and the seed-packet should not be open within the park. Many people might not realize this but many of the native plants of the US are not only getting extinct because of native-habitat-loss, climate-change and use of chemicals, but because of people plucking wild-flowers or digging-out, taking cuttings-of-wild-flower plants in the hope of growing them in their own gardens. The plants, obviously, fail to grow in the gardens, out of their natural place, and in the process the native plant gets destroyed and thus extinct. If one wants to grow native plants (which is always highly encouraged), one needs to buy them from proper source and not take them from wild refuge or state/national parks.

The packet contains about 375 seeds of the vibrant hues of the Poppy, the striking lavender-colored "Flowers of the Starts", the Pacific Aster, and the bright-yellow pompoms of the Wild Buckwheat. . It says that the seeds will grow in most climates of the world. So, hopefully it will grow in New Jersey. The most difficult challenge will be where to grow them in the garden, and how to design the garden so that I will have own small patch of the wilderness of the Wild West.

I am dedicating this post to my best friend Aim-Pie for this most beautiful gift :-). 

Friday, January 11, 2013

Writer's Block

I am going through a writer's block. Well no can blame me with the weather being that of freezing temperature, ice, snow and slushy rain. Actually, I am overwhelmed with all my teaching load and course development projects. But, still I could not resist taking out some time and post this information here. Today, I came to know about Rainbow Eucalyptus Tree. It fascinated me so much that I decided to post about it here.

Here is a picture of the tree that I copied from http://blog.cuipo.org.


The tree apparently shed barks and reveals barks of various colors like blue, green, orange, purple, brown. It can be found in Hawaii, Philippines, and more pictures can be found here .

Here is a video .