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-Babe Ruth
-Babe Ruth
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Welcome to Roots and Maps, I hope you find ideas and information you can use here.
Do you love art, nature, and a little adventure? Then you have come to the right place.
I made Roots and Maps to celebrate and advise the curious gardeners and explorers among us!
The website is intended to be provocative, informative, and energizing for all of us creative, adventurous diggers.
This page is to help you navigate through the site easily and find the resources you need.
The gardeners I know all see the universe through their own special lens. It seems to me that all the great gardeners I know begin to operate from that well-known intersection of both art and nature.
Art and Nature
“Art takes nature as its model”
As any botanist will tell you we humans, classify every living thing into its Genus and species. We are in the Genus, Homo, and our species is Homo sapiens, wise humans, so we try to live up to it!
For gardeners, it makes that Genus to which we all belong; both unique and valuable, particularly in a world becoming in so many ways more bland and less verdant.
To the gardeners everywhere, long may your trowels wave!
I always thought this viewpoint, from one of the world’s most influential gardeners was inciteful:
“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always energetic, and never satisfied.”
It sums us all up, doesn’t it!
Try this:
Read about modern gardeners, medieval gardeners, young gardeners, old ones; professional, or hobbyists. They all share it; this belief that art and nature can cure many ills in the world.
I made Roots and Maps for us, particularly as we also know that we need to bring science into the mix. Fortunate to have access to my state’s land grant university research I’ll provide the best information available.
Gardeners are unique and when they get the chance to put the trowels down and see the world they act with curiosity and inventiveness. I’ll include some inspiring places.
I am Jane Monti, lifelong gardener, and always curious explorer. Like me, you may feel that you have been locked at home for the past two years and you are eager to grab the bit and go! I’ll show you some adventure ideas as we go along.
These days I volunteer as a Master Gardener working through my state agricultural college, advising other home gardeners in my county. In our group, we offer garden clinics (where you can bring your sick plant), a public display garden, and my husband and I work on a fall garden show and a spring lecture series. and we volunteer by planting and enhancing the community we live in.
It was sitting on the bow of a historic narrowboat on the Thames in the medieval town of Oxford-exhausted, on the first night of a 6-week trip that would bring lots of surprises-that I finally realized, “there is a good story here.” Why can’t all of us homebodies do this?
I garden every day and can’t resist a look at someone else’s garden. I love the optimism of gardeners, and it does not matter if it’s the garden of a current digger or one that has been gone for 300 years. We all have the same genes and sense of beauty.
If you like me, believe that life led at the intersection of art and nature is the way to go-you’re in the right place. Thanks for stopping by, I hope you find something you can use.
We can’t communicate without using our own language, here are some of the terms and expressions you will find here.
-Know your own plant hardiness zone.
-Lean on your own state Land Grant University system including your own local Extension Service. Here is how to find your local office.
-Use the network of valuable public gardens. Save this
I’m interested in these three broad categories; here are some samples of subjects you might find useful Try them out, let me know if they help. (Contact me.) This is a link to the contact me page.
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