Letters to GreenPrints

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I particularly like Becky Rupp’s comprehensive but fun to read stories taking in history and science of gardening, and other things we haven’t even thought of. Thus also liked this month’s Don Nicholas Celery, Banana, and Ginger stories. Also really liked HARVESTING WOOD and RAISED BED BLUES. We have a bit of woods and I used to cut fallen logs for fireplace wood with my grandfather’s logging saw. Got old and bought an EGO battery chain saw. Also started building raised beds with useable boards from our old deck that had to be taken down. But I love everything, the variety, just some things more than others.
—Lary Johnson, Golden Valley, MN

Love the article about sweetbay magnolias. I grew up with two magnolia grandiflora a that lived in front of my grandmother’s house in the Mississippi Delta. .One was somewhat older than the other, rather like siblings several years apart in age. The older & larger had been an established tree when my mother, born in 1910. It provided a both a living gymnasium as well as a place of quiet sitting & reading for anyone who learned to climb its branches & enjoy its nesting spots. It lives on in my memories as a place of peace & repose, & meditation..
—Eleanor Schnabel

I would many times go out to my back garden in full moonlight just to see and take a sniff of the lovely moonflower vines growing up the fence of my garden. However, one night as I went just out the front door to sniff a trumpet flower hanging upside down, I put my nose right into it and out came a huge moth! After this fright, I always lifted the flower first before sniffing.
A lovely story of moonflower persistence and winning in the end!
—Mo Pascoe-Hoyal, Dry Prong, LA