Tiny vegetable gardens

A lot of food can come from a small garden; in Lesotho, farmers are proving just how much can be done:

[Mahaha Mphou] and the rest of her family of 10 have become some of the most enthusiastic evangelists for a home-grown idea that has almost certainly saved them from starvation.
They are now thriving on what have become known as "keyhole gardens". They are round gardens of about two metres in diameter and raised to waist-height to make them easy for the sick and elderly to work.
"As you can see, (Mahaha's family) has three keyhole gardens and that's more than enough to supply all 10 of them with all the vegetables they need, and with some left over to sell. It's changed their lives."

Read the full, fascinating story on the BBC.

That's the spirit!

'When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted the Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."'

Read more about these dangerous semicolons in this great story on Slate. Thanks to Jana for the link.

More than just groceries

An enterprising young Palmerston North mechanic has motorised a shopping trolley for riding around in. Apparently it can do 45km/h! And it's legal to ride on the road. The full story here.

Graham Bennett exhibition - Converse

If you're in Christchurch be sure to catch this amazing show of Graham Bennett sculptures at The Art House in Gloucester St, until 15 June.
Bennett's subject matter in the show deals with New Zealand's antipodean location, mapping, navigation, and the migration of peoples by sea. His beautiful, immaculate forms also suggest sentinels, lookouts, and alien peoples.
The show's centerpiece, the monumental PoDs, features a crowd of 60 forms of various heights, the tallest up to 4 metres high.
Apparently Graham Bennett has just turned 60 himself. Many happy returns, Graham. :-)

Atmospheric optics - what an amazing site

Anyone interested in clouds, rainbows, ice halos, the aurora, green flashes, or any other crazy optical effects happening in the atmosphere will love this site.

Honestly, it has so many pages full of information and stunning photographs that I have only looked at a small portion! Which means I have a lot more to look forward to. :-D

The page that I first looked at is of rare ice halos photographed over Antarctica in 1999. Truly staggering images! And the site explains the more common halos to look out for, as well as fascinating speculation on the ice halos that might be seen on other planets, where the airborne ice crystals are made of methane, ammonia, or carbon dioxide!

Megan Lewis

Photographer Megan Lewis, originally from New Zealand, spent 5 years living with the Martu people in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.
Her amazing photographs are the subject of her book, Conversations with the Mob. You can read more about it here. And there are some sample images on this page.

Dance dialects

Bees dance to tell each other where to find nectar. The dance is a coded representation of distance and direction, but not all bees do it in the same way: geographically separated populations of bees have slightly different dances.

Reasearchers in China have found that with practice, bees can learn to interpret the dances of foreign bees. Read the full story here.

Clothing travels

This fascinating photo essay in the Guardian shows how used clothing from the UK is recycled into new clothing and textiles in India, and how Indian saris are recycled into new clothing for sale in the UK.

Polyanthus montage

Image copyright 2007 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

Now available in both greeting card and gift card sizes here.

Iris

Image copyright 2007 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

Now available in both greeting card and gift card sizes here.

Cream peony

Image copyright 2007 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

Now available in both greeting card and gift card sizes here.

Fern frond montage

Image copyright 2007 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

Now available in both greeting card and gift card sizes here.

New card designs

I haven't posted here for a while, but now I can show you the reason: four new designs that appear on my greeting cards and gift cards at Rata Design! You're very welcome to tell me what you think about them.

I want a puggle!

What is a baby platypus called? A puggle! I kid you not! There's a picture of one here. And there's a neat article on platypuses here in the NYT. (access is free but registration is required)

Baby echidnas are also called puggles, and there's one here.

Morris and Co.

The Christchurch City Art Gallery has Morris and Co: The World of William Morris until June 29th. It's a beautiful show, with printed textiles, wallpaper, embroidery, furniture, carpets, books, ceramics, and the centerpiece of the show, the vast, jewel-like tapestry of The Adoration of the Magi. It's worth seeing the show for that alone - no photograph can adequately convey the shining, rippling surface of millions of tiny stitches. And while the symbolism is rather laboured, the rich colour harmonies and beautifully-observed naturalistic detail in the plants and faces and objects is exciting to look at.

One thing that would have increased my enjoyment of the Morris designs was more technical information about how they were printed and made. I was tantalised by a photograph of the Morris workshop printing chintz fabric, with stacks of wooden printing blocks visible in the photo, but no indication of how such a method was used to produce such fine, continuous, printed pattern. And how were the inks made? I gather they were derived from plants, but I'd love to know the details.

And how did the cost of producing Morris designs by hand compare with the cost of factory production? How different did they look? What are the economics of hand-printing today? Morris's revolt against mass-production and worker exploitation seems highly relevant to the globalised market we have today. But I wonder how many people could afford to surround themselves with beautiful hand-printed, hand-crafted objects.

I was pleased to see more information on Morris's book-printing techniques given on the gallery website, and the links they make to artisan-printing in New Zealand.

The exhibition is accompanied by a huge range of events, from lectures to performances, demonstrations, and even workshops in Morris-style embroidery, wallpaper- printing, and life-drawing!