Rotting Beauty: a Dying Art

Most of the gardens I'm seeing in the neighborhood look like hell, particularly my own. I'm tripping over birch tree limbs and slipping on slimy, unraked leaves. And my banana tree is truly death warmed over.

I typically take offense at its apres-frost limp, brown foliage (bananas die back to the ground here and come up anew in spring). But after seeing Sweeney Todd yesterday — so unimaginably glorious! — I'm feeling a certain fondness towards rot, death, decay.

And so I offer you, on this dark gray Erev Yontif (roughly translated from Hebrew/Yiddish, it means the night before the holiday, in this case Xmas Eve!), a sad and somehow celebratory You Tube video of rotting as art.

11:55 AM ET | 12-24-2007 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail

Historic Pruners, Only $129.95

This just in...

Now YOU can own a pair of pruners with handles made from an ancient Versaille oak!

Ever hear of the outlandish architect Andre Le Notre (insert accent grave, aigu, etc)? How about the gardens of Versaille? OK, so now we're on the same page.

It seems that one fine day in 1679, Le Notre planted an English (gasp!) oak for his boss, the Sun King. Or maybe he just pointed, and his gardeners planted it. So fine a tree it was, no less an idler than Marie Antoinette used to chill out beneath its arms.

Anyway, this Quercus rober had nine lives, escaping makeover-crazed kings and who knows how many storms and hurricanes, until it finally succumbed at age 324 in the ghastly French summer of 2003, a summer which tragically took human lives.

So here's the punchline: the folks who've been cashing in on the dead tree with various other collectables (oh, to have a Versaille oak corkscrew!) have just released a pair of wood-handled pruners made from this venerable oak.

The even better news is that a seedling of this mighty giant is making new history at Versaille.

2:40 PM ET | 11- 9-2007 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail