Sandra Knauf was born in California and spent most of her childhood in Missouri. She moved to Colorado when she was a teenager, and she lives there to this day, in Colorado Springs with her family. She is the publisher and editor of Greenwoman Magazine, a garden writing magazine, which she started in 2010. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, GreenPrints, Colorado Gardener, and many other publications, and she has been a guest commentator on NPR’s “Western Skies” radio show. Zera and the Green Man is her first novel.
On the eve of Zera Green’s fifteenth birthday, she’s finding little to celebrate. Her guardian, Uncle Theodore (whom she’s nicknamed “the Toad”), and his frilly girlfriend, Tiffany, are dragging her to the opening of a fast-food restaurant. There they’ll celebrate The Toad’s latest GMO creation—“beefy fries”—fries made from a combination of cow and potato. (They are said to be delicious, but the potatoes bleed a little when they’re sliced.)
A couple of years ago I read about the seed packages at Hudson Valley See Library designed by a number of local artists. I visited the site at once, and it was there that I first saw Sheryl Humphrey’s work, on an Art Pack design for Rainbow Chard. I was wowed. I remember happily whiling away a […]
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←Part Two Country Life with Fred The Stock Market Crash of 1929 hit everyone hard, including the newlyweds. In early 1930, they moved to the outskirts of Redding, Connecticut, to a 55-acre farm for their retirement. They, like many during that time, felt they could live cheaply off the land. That spring, Ruth Stout
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←Part One New York City Soon after May’s death, the family made the move to New York City. Their new home would be a four-story brownstone on West 118th St., less than a block from Morningside Park (designed by the famous American landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted). Ruth would live in New York City
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It’s 1975 and Ruth Stout, in her early 90s, is being filmed at her home. She’s explaining her daily schedule, how many hours a day she works to maintain, harvest, and freeze food from a 45 x 50 foot vegetable garden which grows enough food for two people. (She hasn’t been in a grocery store
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“The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.” –Jean Giraudoux If you have a thriving garden, there’s an orgy in your backyard. Flowers are the sex organs of most plants* and their perfume may be what first brings the revelers. Many flowers—from trees, shrubs, annuals
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I thought I’d share some nonsense, but then it turned a bit serious. I’m referring to Edward Lear. In one of my Greenwoman issues I shared a few illustrations from Lear’s 1888 book, Nonsense Botany. I thought I’d share a few more today to give you a fuller look into his nonsense, and then write a
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