Christmas doesn’t.
I knew a guy once who couldn’t figure out the difference between Christian months and Islamic months–and he damn near lost his life. I wrote a novel about it: Tangier Gardens, try it then buy it @ https://amzn.to/3HLrtyv
Had your fill of 2023??
Brighten up. Re-charge!
Find the most efficient, accessible and best way to re-charge in 2024.
That is what CJ discovered in my book Tangier Gardens. The ebook is on sale, 75% off!!
TODAY ONLY @ Smashwords, here: https://bit.ly/3SIAfma
Landscape Architecture makes the benefits of nature’s prescription accessible to all, regardless of belief, politics, sociology, economics, sensual deprivation, age or gender. Take a walk with me in this snowy forest path image, or in Tangier Gardens where a student, CJ, first realizes the essence of landscape architecture.
Do you see a problem?
Neither did CJ. Discover how he saw it in: Tangier Gardens
Buy it at: https://amzn.to/3HLrtyv
My secret pleasure? I find it when I see clouds forming and escaping from the mountains.
When the temperature, humidity and barometric pressure are amenable, I can see the mountains breathing.
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This pleasure from nature, the landscape, the topography, the plants…that is the heart of CJ’s discoveries in my novel, Tangier Gardens, where the student becomes mesmerized by the northwest Africa landscape and Tangier gardens. Interested? Buy the book.
Want to know more? Join my email list–discounts and more.
Thank you
It is that time of year.
It’s here. There is no doubt.
What’s this?
It’s the autumn.
We don’t have those North American attention grabbing sugar maples or even their cousins around here.
I can not turn away from my evergreen source of inspiration. It is a landscape that continuously surprises me with its overwhelming awe, its raw power and a beauty that leaves me speechless —harmonic beauty. And it always makes me ask questions–about transportation infrastructure, water resources, land management. I love it. Refreshing it is.
Romantic landscape? Definitely. Evergreen inspiration. Evergreen succour.
What is a nature prescription? Why do you need it? Political or health albatross around your neck? A walk out past the edge of town?…just like Dancing in the Moonlight. Take a break.
How can I get free of this stinking political and health fear-stuffed albatross?
Suppose this page is about you…and suppose you are wound up tighter than a drum by the tension of world wide and local politics and health. This page is your wayfinder.
THE PURPOSE OF THE BLOG AND ALL MY WRITING is to assist you the visitor to begin taking steps along a path toward discovering the regenerative existential cures to be freely found in plants, gardens and the landscape.
THE FIRST STEP is what could be called ‘nature prescriptions’–calibrated doses of time outside. Take a walk. But does the walk heal? What actually happens? What is on the path that takes you on a journey? Where do landscape journeys take you?
And why even take that path and that journey?
A walk, a journey just for the landscape?–heh, I know what you are thinking–we all know what landscape is, right? Same old, same old, right?
flahertylandscape contends it is more–consider this:
The landscape can be a private cocoon to rest the restless.
On the walk you may weave dreams full of surprise and delight yielding true moments of repose.
It can be a journey to unwind, to regenerate, to reconnect with inner peace, to nest away from the daily hustle and bustle.
I am a naive midwestern American kind of guy–born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland–not really urban, not really rural. Farming has always been a mystery to this outsider.
Everything I encounter in this agricultural mountain landscape…naively captivates me.
Around my own home the first haycuts are already underway–there is the fragrance of a freshly cut lawn–we all have that familiar smell but the smell of freshly cut pasture hay? We had a couple good rains in May–all pastures were rich with grasses and wild flowers–the wild flowers went to seed first then the grasses–and as the grasses were going to seed in the first days of June we had a spell of sunny warm weather.
All the farmers down here at the valley bottom were out cutting their pastures. Fragrance at daytime and night time. They let the cut hay dry in the open fields for a couple days before binding it for later use as feed.
What does that have to do with ‘Up the valley’?
Well, everything in my topographical homeland was flat. Topography and its impact on life in the mountain landscape intrigues me. So, I took a walk up the valley–up the Lutschine River valley to a village named Gundlischwand (+/- 660 meters above sea level). That means uphill 100 meters–doesn’t sound like much does it? Couldn’t be further–amazing walk–here’s what happened. The valley changed. The topography changed. The plants changed.
I was going back in time.
In the mountains spring comes first at the low valley elevations. Then by the time spring comes to the higher elevations it is normally not days but weeks later.
So when I walked up the valley I was walking back in time. Climatically speaking.
The price of admission?
A stuffy nose, a couple sneezes and a runny nose–all in sequence.
It took me 1/2 hour to walk the next 100 meters.
But that will be a journey for another day.
