Friday, September 12, 2008

digging up dirt

I was at the Great Outdoors and I saw a sign on the seed rack. I took a picture of it with my phone but I'm having technical difficulties trying to send it to an e-mail account. It said:

"Attention Seed Thieves: All of our Morning Glory and Poppy seeds are treated making them ineffective for what you want. Please quit stealing them."

A Google search of Morning Glory when I got home yielded tons of sites about using them for non-horticultural purposes.

While online I came across more drug-related, garden-related and overall interesting stuff.

Little did I know that Castor beans are poisonous. I'd heard of them and seen them in the odd seed catalog here and there but had no idea what ricin was.

Salvia divinorum? is that some kind of sage? I love pineapple sage! No, this article in the NY Times is definitely not about the Salvia I'm thinking about.

Marijuana used as a hedge in Australia, the neighbors never suspected a thing. "It just looks like an ordinary hedge in a suburban yard." Found on Neatorama.

Peyote in Austin? I thought it only grew in the desert out west somewhere (see Sept 7, it's a hoot.)

I'm no Pollyanna but this is a lot of drug stories in a few days. I'm not interested in using plants for mind altering purposes (except coffee and chocolate), but I am very interested in how plants and people interact. I think plants are an important element for humanity to help define ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. I think I'll leave this topic on that point.

I could talk about America's war on drugs here and I've thought a lot about writing about politics on this blog. There is so much to say these days but I'll leave it elsewhere. I perceive gardens to be neutral spaces and should be not have an ideology forced on them. I don't consider environmental issues to be very political because it is the concern of all living creatures to live on a clean planet no matter what political party they join. I think gardening can be healing and should bring people together. Maybe I'll write about politics when it starts to directly affect my garden but right now I think there is plenty of discussion elsewhere.

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