Global Swarming Honeybees: A History of White House Gardens

4.13.2009

A History of White House Gardens

Recently we posted an article from the Thrill Dept. about the new vegetable garden and beekeeping scene over on the White House lawn along with a fun video about the history of White House gardens (see below).

Along similar lines, I recently found this nugget of fun on the website of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (a truly wonderful place in the Home Borough): First Gardens: An Election Year Primer on the White House Gardens, published last summer. It's well worth reading, and don't miss the part (and the very end) about Ronald Reagan and the sinkhole—priceless and just so achingly metaphoric.

And here's that video I posted last month, in case you missed it:

The Garden of Eatin': A Short History of America's Garden from roger doiron on Vimeo.

1 comment:

KC said...: loved the video and the BBG site. Love ER, too, just for the record.; April 30, 2009 at 8:25 PM

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die