Standing in slush, would you trade it for manure? If your answer is yes, these magazines are for you.
City slickers looking to populate their new rural spreads may want to know: What exactly are donkeys for? “They pay attention,” Country Gardens explains. These big-eared sentinels are eternally suspicious of everything from stray coyotes to cars rolling into the driveway. Nor do they enjoy the company of cats and dogs. “They stand in the barnyard with their ears facing forward and their eyes sharpened into little judgmental slits,” the mag says, somehow managing to make donkeys sound like a must-have accessory in the process. In an equally delightful feature on bulbs, we are told that daffodils propogate themselves as perennials, which is “good news for your sacroiliac.”
Small Gardens should be perfect for New Yorkers except for one not-so-small problem: The gardens featured are often ginormous. Okay, maybe not ginormous, but average size. Certainly not small. Still, there’s a lot that city dwellers can glean from the mag. For example, it advises folks with limited land to “go vertical,” or plant upwards using trellises, ladders or what have you. Also we like the piece on rooftop gardening, which features the 7,000-square-foot Lotus Garden on the Upper West Side. But once again, 7,000 square feet? That’s the size of a small mansion.
Small-Space Gardening professes to be a do-it-yourself guide for those poor souls who don’t have the luxury of several acres to dedicate to their horticultural whims. From a New Yorker standpoint, the vast majority of the spaces depicted in the pub — an offshoot of Fine Gardening magazine — are outright gigantic. The mag does a fair job providing graphics and illustrations for DIY-garden projects but some better examples might help the magazine get a few of its points across. For example, one article titled, “Make your space feel bigger,” describes one backyard as being like the “the bottom of a swimming pool.” But that image is left to the reader’s imagination. Elsewhere the Taunton Press publication recommends using colors and “found objects” to both enliven your garden and make small spaces seem larger than the bathroom in a Manhattan studio apartment.
For some folks, plants and flowers aren’t enough decoration for their yards. They like to stuff nature into a whole bunch of trash. (Apologies, upcycling friends!) Flea Market Gardens is an intriguing look at how to decorate old tires, bath tubs, beat-up shoes and typewriters with greenery. We kid not. Clearly aimed at an older female reader, FMG blooms with romantic photography of outdoor rooms covered with floral arbors, and staged with jugs of strawberry lemonade. FMG is a great read for those who can’t nip their shabby chic decorating habits in the bud.
Pick up this week’s issue of the New Yorker, if only for the hilarious “Shouts & Murmurs” column by Gavin Shulman featuring an imagined conversation that all New York cabbies seem to be having as they drive their customers around town. Humorist David Sedaris offers a wry take on the bureaucracy of replacing one’s passport after a burglary. Sedaris notes that his new passport photo makes him look like “a penis with an old person’s face drawn on it,” as only he could put it.
The latest issue of New York delivers readers a soup-to-nuts-how-it-all-went-down feature on the “Today” show drama involving Matt Lauer and Ann Curry. If you’re pretty much full of that topic, the Intelligencer section gets the scoop on former NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey’s new life as an Episcopal minister and finds he’s counseling women after life in prison, among other things. In trend news: Danish pastries are back in fashion.
Time throws its spotlight on a Hollywood-backed cancer cure initiative that distinguishes itself by throwing big money at the bold-faced names of science and medicine. The cover title, “How to Cure Cancer,” is an uplifting read for those fed up with research roadblocks. We’re not sure of the rationale for the shocking spread on domestic violence that shows graphic photos of a man choking and beating his partner with a toddler looking on. Time explains that the photos helped sentence the perp and form a powerful image as the Violence Against Women Act was passed a few weeks ago. Bizarrely, the “Culture” section on the next page has an odd photo of actor Rosario Dawson biting James McAvoy’s face.