The Garden in Winter

Clippings from the garden

Holly and everygreens brighten the pass-through between our kitchen and dining room.

I am borrowing my headline for this post from the title of the wonderful book The Garden in Winter by British plantswoman Rosemary Verey. I received this book as a gift from my aunt more than a decade ago, and it inspired me and my husband to pay attention to the cycle of seasons when choosing the shrubbery for the three acres we attempt to garden (or keep moderately under control) in northwestern Virginia. We now have several crops of fall and winter berries, including nandinia and miniature crab apple, along with a space we leave to run wild to encourage the annual spread of bittersweet vines. As winter approaches, we are gifted with four varieties of holly and eight or ten varieties of evergreen. One of the great pleasures of the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas is my annual ritual of harvesting greens and holly for miniature indoor arrangements. In the past several years, a new winter color, bright chartreuse green, has arrived on the scene in our neighborhood nurseries, in the form of Golden Cypress shrubs. One Golden Cypress, Chamaecyparis pisifera, supplies bright golden thread-like foliage that transforms arrangements. I hope to get one of these planted in 2009.

Get Married, Stay Married

Dutch painter Jan van Eyck's marriage painting of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami

What is the best environment for raising children? A study by Washington and Lee University School of Law Robin Fretwell Wilson answers this question in the good old-fashioned way: Children do best raised in a stable family home with both of their parents, and all the scientific studies show that this is true. Wilson recently discussed her findings at the November 2008 Georgia Supreme Court Summit on Children, Marriage, and Family Law titled For Children's Sake: Get Married, Stay Married.

Her 2006 research review with University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox describes study after study showing poorer outcomes for children raised outside of stable two-parent families. For males, children raised outside of two-parent families are twice as likely to be incarcerated by age 30; a recent study of the entire Swedish population found that children raised outside of the traditional family structure are twice as likely to attempt suicide, engage in substance abuse, and suffer from depression. Studies elsewhere in the West show lower achievement in school, higher rates of teenage pregnancy and promiscuity, lower employability, and much reduced lifetime income. All of this research “controls” for socioeconomic factors, such as race, income, and, education. From the standpoint of social science research design, all of Wilson’s cited studies have been scrubbed, polished, vetted, and reviewed. The conclusion is hard science—or as hard as social science gets. And Wilson has piled it up in a mountain too huge for public officials to ignore.

Wilson notes that it is the family (a married mother and a father collaborating in the rearing of children), not the biology, that is the main factor in creating positive outcomes for children. The children of cohabitating biological parents shown less positive outcomes. Wilson also reviews studies showing that adopted children raised in traditional nuclear families are better off by all measured criteria than children raised in homes with a single biological parent. These findings are crucial to addressing the question of how the states should regulate the placement of children for adoption when biological parents can no longer care for them. Assuming that states should and must employ a “best interests of the child” standard to regulate adoptive placements (which, by law, all states now in fact claim to do), every effort must be made to place adoptive children in homes with two married parents.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Ups & Downs

The lovely maids of the wedding party, arrayed like jewels in a bridal tiara.

Into each life some rain must fall. Indeed. And with every plan for a wedding, comes frustration, fatigue, misunderstandings, short tempers, and--it's best if you count on it--unhappiness. If you expect to get from the engagement to the honeymoon without getting stuck in an emotional rut, you will be disappointed. Budgets get bigger, daughters get distraught, bridesmaids get overbooked, fathers fritz, and mothers morph into Momzillas. So plan on it: getting ready for a wedding will bring boatloads of happiness into your life. But along the way, there will be days when you feel downright unhappy.

My advice to brides, mothers, and other participants falls into three categories:

1. The wedding is the bride's day. With her rests the choice of gown, venue, colors, flowers, music, food, and most other details. In European weddings 500 years ago, even the maidens of the bridal party were chosen as adornments to the bride, a boast of her home village--and received by the best man with a special toast to their beauty, as epitomized by the bride.
2. The wedding ceremony is a sacrament. This is also the day of the bride and groom, as they as joined by God as one flesh for the remainder of their lives on earth. Do everything to make them happy and keep them securely focused on this mystery (in the case of the bride, pray for her groom and his family, in the case of the groom, pray for his bride and her family).
3. Learn and follow the rules. There are rules for the bride, for the grooms, for the parents, for the maids, for the groomsman, and even for the guests. The mile-high pile of books on wedding planning lays them out pretty well. If you chose to participate in a wedding, get ready for it by learning the rules. Once you have learned the rules, follow them. They have been tried and tested by millions of brides, grooms, and their families over the centuries, and they work. They were, in fact, designed and modified to minimize wedding ups and downs, and keep everyone happy.

A Fungus Among Us

From the stump of decaying oak tree, on a northern Virginia wooded mountain.











At the base of the same oak. My field guide indicates these are Orange Jack O'Lanterns.

The gill structure on this 9 inch specimen was particularly beautiful.


There are four or five identifiable species on this rotting branch from a Black Locust tree in our front yard.

I was delighted when my friend and fellow blogger Linda reported that Beatrix Potter was a mycologist. I have been a fungus lover from childhood, and even considered this for college studies. I've always held the firm belief that fairies do sit under mushrooms, and if you can find one of the bright red ones in a forest, you may get the chance to chat with Queen Mab. Several very rainy days in September produced a beautiful crop of specimens in and around our neighborhood.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Staging & Serving

Our talented day chef brought a talented helper, who spent several hours assembling the antepasto course.

Tick tock. As the weeks passed and our daughter's wedding drew closer, it became more and more apparent that no amount of advance work would prepare us to get through the Big Day without help. One of the wedding books stacked up on my bed table advised that good planning required a mental "walkthrough" of the events of the day, in great detail. When I went through this visualization exercise, I realized that, in fact, we required a small army. To process the food we planned to serve our guests (slicing, cutting, chopping, wrapping, defrosting), we needed three food preparation helpers for the day before the wedding. To handle the crowd of more than 150 on the day of, we needed a day chef, two sous chefs, two bartenders, and five servers. This was on top of the disk jockey, the volunteer parking attendants, a house helper in charge of clearing away rubble, attending to house guests, and locating items for the chef in the kitchen, and the teenagers assigned to watching over the babies and toddlers while their parents joined the celebration.

For those of you considering a do-it-yourself wedding to save money, I can report that the cost of this labor power for the final staging and serving (of drinks, appetizers, dinner, and dessert) cost as much as the food, cake, and wine we purchased. So, when you do your budget projections, make sure to take this into consideration. More on what I learned about wedding budgets is to come.

Defeat the Freedom of Choice Act

"The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do." -- Senator Barack Obama, speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007

As the nation prepares to welcome up to 4 million visitors to Washington, D.C. for the January 20th inauguration of Barak Obama, let us consider the best way to defeat a piece of legislation that the President-elect repeatedly promised to support--"The Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA).
FOCA as it is now written would establish the right to abortion as a fundamental right (at the same level as the right to free speech) and wipe away every restriction on abortion nationwide. It would eradicate state and federal abortion laws the majority of Americans support and prevent states from enacting protective measures in the future.
FOCA provides that “[i]t is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.”
Further, FOCA would specifically invalidate any "statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action" of any federal, state, or local government or governmental official (or any person acting under government authority) that would "deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose" abortion, or that would "discriminate against the exercise of the right . . . in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information."
Clearly, its reach is very broad. This single piece of legislation would apply to any federal or state law “enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of [its] enactment.”

• FOCA would compel taxpayer funding of abortions.
• FOCA would force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.
• FOCA would force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.

Please read the expert analysis by Americans United for Life (AUL), sign the Fight FOCA petition at: http://www.fightfoca.com/, and consider what else you might do as an American citizen and activist, to discourage the President from supporting the FOCA legislation. For daily news on how the Obama White House is dealing with the abortion issue, visit http://www.onenationundergod.org/ms_president_elect_obama.html, maintained at the One Nation Under God web site. One Nation Under God also tracks the contributions of Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion organizations to candidates for public office, so this is the place to locate information on your congressman and senator.

The Italian

Russian actor Kolya Spiridonov plays an orphan, adopted by an affluent childleses Italian couple and about to be shipped out of Russia, who is determined to find his mother.

Here is a wonderful film from Russian director Andrei Kravchuk that speaks directly to the power of God’s love as it is expressed in the bond between mother and child in the human family, at the same time it reveals the grotesque commercial aspects of the international adoption system, which more often than not treats orphaned children as commodities to be traded among desperate bidders. Kravchuk, a mathematician by training, was inspired to make The Italian after reading the story of an abandoned Russian child who learned how to read so he could search for his mother. His palette could be called drab and grey, were it not for the remarkable splashes of color that burst into its frames: the fly-away red hair of the teenaged orphan-prostitute who teaches the young protagonist his alphabet, the azure blue frames of the rural nursery’s doors, the burnt orange of the slum hovels in the nearby city. Likewise, Kravchuk’s theme could be characterized as dismal: a mafia of dead-ended never-to-be-adopted teenagers runs this orphanage; the dragon lady social worker threatens children with the mental asylum if they do not cooperate in her sleazy deals, and gangs of homeless juvenile thugs roam the streets of the local village. The Italian, however, is a firmly optimistic film, and well worth the viewing.