Garden Musings
Essays on gardening and life from the Kansas Flint Hills
by
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From the essay titled "I Garden (in Kansas): Therefore I Suffer": "I’m willing to put good money up against all comers from the gardening world that Kansans have the worse collective garden conditions, because I have found, as others have, that to garden here takes a special courage and optimism. Or at least it takes the special blend of a self-flagellant masochist who looks on the scenes in Dante’s Inferno as a vacation paradise. Think I’m kidding? So did I for several years. " From the essay titled "Statue Searches": "I’m afraid I draw the line at having a statue in my garden that will be physically arousing when first viewed every morning. It’s just too exhausting to have around. And as a general rule, if it can’t pass the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography, it probably isn’t suitable in any garden outside of California or the Playboy Mansion." From the essay titled "Landscapes in Day-Glo Orange and Purple": "During drives around my town, whole houses and additions are seen bounded and bonded by puke purple blobs, accented by day-glo orange flowers, and punctuated by the faintly musty hues of most flowering spireas. Just today, I drove by new landscaping near some apartments in town that consisted of thirty-eight purple barberries in a massive bunch on a berm with three gold-tipped junipers at the ends and apex of the planting. One wonders why the designer didn’t just paint the ground mauve, edge it in highway orange and let it go at that."
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About the Book
In the first essay in Garden Musings, this gardening writer states, “The evidence keeps racking up that I, the Hoosier-born offspring of several generations of farmers, chose through ignorance to garden in a delightful area combining the world’s worst soil and an exasperating climate, all augmented by various man-made and natural catastrophes such as tornadoes, droughts, prairie fires, hail, drenching rains, ice-storms, late freezes, boiling summers, and seventy mile per hour winds.“ Gardening, with all the pressures of struggle between the environment, wild animals, and the gardener, and particularly in the harsh Kansas weather, is not for the faint-hearted as demonstrated by the many essays in the book including Sweet (Corn) Pain, Weather-Weary, Midden Misery, and Soil Sorrows. While the essays are full of useful personal observations about gardening style, plant information, and garden practices, the author also turns his wry eye on tumbling a number of gardening tenets and institutions as he turns his attentions on composting, lawn maintenance, and landscape designers who work primarily in junipers, Japanese barberry and Stella de Oro daylilies. The timing and content of programming of the Home and Garden Television Network and the lack of availability of G-rated gardening statues are other topics that don’t escape this garden curmudgeon. Gardeners searching for practical advice or simply for winter-reading pleasure will all find fulfillment within these pages.
About the Author
Author biography: Dr. James K. Roush is a 2007 Riley County Master Gardener. He now gardens on a shallow façade of clay overlying the chert and limestone bedrock of the Kansas Flint Hills that provides a sharp contrast in gardening experience to the deep Indiana soils he was raised on. When he’s not gardening, reading about gardening, or writing about gardening, he is a small animal veterinary orthopedic surgeon and a Professor at the Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine. A long-suffering wife and two children share his time and tribulations with the garden.