reading Wednesday

Recently read books:

Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma, is an anthology of short sf and fantasy with hopeful if not happy endings, and is just what I need in these stressful times.

The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf, is an intellectual biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a natural historian and explorer, who is among other things the namesake of the Humboldt Current, a friend of Goethe and of Simón Bolívar. Humboldt was interested in everything, it seems--his book on South America talked about geography, plants, and mineral resources, and also about slavery and poverty. Thomas Jefferson admired him, and invited him to visit; Humboldt, an ardent abolitionist, was less impressed with Jefferson.

The title of the book is because Humboldt seems to have invented, and certainly popularized, the concept of the natural world, Earth and everything in and on it as a connected whole.

The second half is chapters about people who Humboldt influenced, notably Darwin, Thoreau, and John Muir. I had heard, more than once, that Darwin took Lyell's Principles of Geology with him on the Beagle, but not that he also brought a book by Humboldt, to reread. The book ends with a bit on why Humboldt the person is almost forgotten in the US and UK, while his ideas have been influential to the point that people take them as given, the connections between humans and the natural world, nature as a living whole, climate zones...

optimistic gardening

Because hope is a virtue, I just ordered two more cucumber plants, which might produce cucumbers before the season ends, based on the nursery's information about "time to harvest."

I was looking at nursery websites to get an idea of when I'd want to order plants for next year, and saw "now shipping" on these, as well as on tomatoes that wouldn't have time to grow and ripen in this climate. I decided to spend the money and hope it works, rather than sit around thinking "but I could have" and even "well, since I didn't do it when I saw the option, it's too late now" over the next couple of weeks.

Shipping will be the week of August 10, so I have a few days to think about which container to put the plants in: there's one small container I'm not using (though the plant I tried there a couple of months ago failed), or I could put them in with the existing cucumber plants, which are close to done I think, or the cherry tomatoes.

I think I'm likely to get flowers if not fruit, and I was remarking a few weeks ago that cucumber is a fine ornamental with all those bright yellow flowers.