Benjamin Vogt's Blog, page 28

I'm Not Ready

I admit a great sense of loss when the snow melts. I do not look forward to spring. I have not had my time of rest and introspection, I have not replenished my reserves and deepened my roots, and already the warm sun and temperatures in the 50s are coaxing me out of my depths. I feel strung out in this weather. Overwhelmed. In a few weeks the crocus leaves will shoot out from the brown lawn--already iris reticulata are an inch tall. And now, too, seeds must be started in the basement. It was...

Lawns, "Weeds," and the New Nature

A post in the New York Times on a lawn's / garden's ability to sustain us -- as in, lawn's are dumb. The writer is talking about vegetable gardening almost exclusively, but I may fudge those thoughts with native perennials and shrubs.



-- "True, a lawn is a living, growing thing, a better carbon sink
than concrete (though not as good as a vegetable garden or a meadow),
and even more so if you leave the clippings in place, which also reduces
the need for chemical fertilizer. And most people fi...

Quotes on Writing / Living Memoir

Some of these speak so closely to me right now as I struggle through a first first first draft; I'm all lost one day and found the next, losing faith about form only to say screw it and find faith again. Then I lose the narrative thread because the fog of words conceals them -- when I cut out superfluous, rambly, preachy sentences and rely on the images and description, the fog lifts and I see the road again. Know your subject. Do research. Watch that fog turn into a plasma cutting beam 'o' p...

New Poetry Book

I'd like to announce the publication of my first full-length poetry collection. Here's what some say:



Afterimage is an unsentimental but heartfelt elegy for the landscape and the people of the twentieth-century Midwest. The poems preserve the lost place, the lost time, and lost inhabitants, but Benjamin Vogt also celebrates the earth's own ability to flower and return, with human assistance and without.  These firm and carefully measured poems are a thoughtful delight, one that should n...

Visiting Grandma -- From the Memoir

I nudged 60,000 words this morning. What I wrote today is below--a very fresh 2,000 words (ignore the tense shifts and other formatting errors) recounting two visits to my grandmother's nursing home in Oklahoma about a decade ago. This was hard to write, but I've vowed to post more new writing as I work on the book. I've included pictures along the way of my grandmother throughout her early life.





 

            Entering the automa...

Four Things That Stirred My Blood This Week

1) Don't medicate your kids -- get them outside. It's free and has no side effects. A new study says "chronic nature exposure" (ha) can ease and heal ADHD and other disorders and imbalances. Strange how, as our society has started spending more time inside, mental and physical health issues have increased. Could it be we are part of this planet? Why do we deny that connection? Why do we work so hard to deny our nature? why do we seek or accept imbalance?



2) As much as half of global food is...

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2012 Garden Picture Redux

I know that no one else is doing some sort of retrospective, so you can't possibly be sick of this shtick. Fiscal cliff. Mayan apocalypse. (Link on over for last year's garden review.)



This year I gave several presentations on native prairie plants, started a garden coaching business, my garden was featured online at Fine Gardening and in the Omaha World Herald, people called me for interviews about gardening (still floored by this), and I started writing a Great Plains gardening column for...

A Blizzard of Birds

The forecasted 6-10" never happened, just about 4" or so. But we finally stopped our record of days between snows at 305 or 310ish. After the "storm" we had dozens of birds -- folks, this is why you leave the garden up in winter and provide a source of water (and food if you want to maintain the feeders). Tons of birds dashing in and out of bent indian grass and joe pye stalks, hopping over drifts, diving from tree to tree.





First the robin came to drink melting snow. Then a bluebird. Then...

Landscapes of Little Meaning

Every day I walk past the newly-expanded power plant at the University of Nebraska. After the sidewalk and street were torn up, the landscape needed mending. Although I'd have to say UNL's landscape is more progressive than most--including scattered beds with modest native plantings and sculpture--they too often succumb to the same old boring, outdated 19th century English blind lunacy of American landscape design.







This new sod--not even drought-tolerant buffalo grass--is wasted space. Ev...