June 18, 2004

Eric Gauger's "Notes from the Road"

It's very strange: just this morning as I blearily gazed at the list of email messages to slog through, it flashed through my brain that it has been a long time since I received an updated "Notes from the Road." Lo and behold, what should appear in my inbox this evening but the very latest dispatch.

Hopetown and the Mystery of Island Settlement is the title of Eric Gauger's latest travel diary entry. As usual, stunning photos.

Hopetown wraps around a West Indies harbor, but also peers out over the Atlantic Ocean. No cars allowed on its narrow streets, but cats are a different matter. Owing to a history of cat lovers, the settlement is profuse with them. Raggedy and glare eying, they stare down from their perches in gum trees and atop clapboard houses painted always in two contrasting shades of pastel. Hopetown looks pretty much how it did two hundred years ago. Only more cats, fewer wooden masts.

MISC.
I was hoping to have time today to install a journal for a friend. Ran out of time. Tomorrow. I'm looking forward to reading it when she starts using it -- which she can't do until I set up the software for her. I need more hours!

sweet-betsy.jpegSome plants I ordered from Rare Bird Nursery arrived today. A black cherry tree, sweetbrush (pictured. AKA Sweet Betsy), and Possumhaw Virburnum. The plants arrived in excellent shape. I'm not sure how these North Carolina transplants will do in Connecticut (coastal Connecticut, to be sure, but the winters can be brutal). But the zones are ok, so I'm hoping they'll be fine.

I want to plant the sweetshrub underneath the austrees in order to block a cement retaining wall. Sweetshrub makes a good habitat for birds besides being very pretty shrubs.

The black cherry tree will go somewhere -- not sure yet, but I just love them and was never able to get one growing any other place I've lived because the deer love them as well. We have a rare deer sighting here since there are no woods or open fields nearby (ours is one of the larger plots of land around here, and it's just half an acre), so maybe I'll have some luck with this one. The viburnum gets white flowers and blue fruits that birds like, like sun to partial shade. The leaves are pretty. Now we just have to get them in the ground -- along with the butterfly bush and the beach plums.

Posted by Lee at June 18, 2004 12:59 AM | TrackBack
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