Deirdre's Garden Diary: 2006 August

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:: 08.21.06 ::

ENOUGH ALREADY!

OK...seriously...this heat and drought has to end soon or I am going to loose my mind! Everything is dying...even the native plants that are supposed to be drought tolerant are droopy and unhappy.

I have to limit how much I can water the yard since city watering restrictions and limits to my budget have to be taken into consideration. I have been pushing both of these to the limit but it doesn't seem to be making any difference
...plants are dying.

I gave up on the grass last month. The only thing green on the ground is the waterhose.

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:: 08.5.06 ::

Since it's really too hot to be doing much gardening outside, I decided to spend a little time scanning in a few of the many pieces of vintage garden ephemera that I have collected. Among my favorites are the sets of Will's Cigarette Cards that I have collected. I have two full sets (50 in each set) of Gardening Hints printed in 1923 and Garden Hints from 1938.

The cards are only 1 3/8 x 2 5/8 inches...much smaller than the scans I have included above which show both the front and back of each card. On the front is an illustration with a title and on the back a brief description of the image usually explaining a helpful gardening tip or bit of trivia. Even though they are antiques the advice on the back of most of them is still relative...in fact, they provided inspiration as you can see here when I made a Tee-Pee trellis for growing cucumbers and beans.

You can see more from this vintage collection of ephemera on my Flickr page.

An interesting side note...the artwork on these cards reminds me of the illustrations that were done for the CD covers of one of my favorite English bands The Beautiful South. Specifically, I am thinking about their CD 0898 which includes the work of artist David Cutter and their CD Miaow with work by another artist, Michael Sowa.
(who's work also makes a brief appearance in one of my favorite French movies, Amélie).

Both of these artist's works have a uniquely "vintage" quality to their representational style and design that borders on the humorous and familiar.