Friday, February 15, 2008

Odds and ends



Once again, I am keeping the original date of this post even though I'm not actually posting it till almost a year later. There are no inherent connections between these stray items, beyond the fact that they all registered as relevant to this still-hypothetical blog at the time.

A site where you can watch every episode of the BBC's Planet Earth series (if you're too cheap to shell out for the elegant box of DVDs, or not in a position to request it as a wedding present, as we did).

Volume III of Giambattista della Porta's Natural Magick, an alchemical text from 1658 "which delivers certain precepts of Husbandry, and shows how to intermingle sundry kinds of Plants and how to produce new kinds." Learn to create an olive-grape! An almond-peach! Grow roses all year long!

An interesting item (in Segment II of this episode of the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge) on writer Alberto Manguel, whose library of over 30,000 books has some garden-like qualities.