Hey Seattle!!

I’m coming your way with a truckload of awesome plants! This Thursday 7:00pm at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, I’ll be giving a talk on my favorite ‘Wildflower Adventures around Oregon and SW Washington”. If you are a fan of the “Where the wild things are” blog postings, this talk is loaded with awesome plants, locations to see fantastic wildflowers and the adventures that come with that. I will have tables of awesome plants out for sale, natives from my adventures around the NW and plants from around the world! Click here for info on the event

This is a once a year only thing so If you are in Washington and you are looking for plants for a rock garden, crevice garden, trough or just awesome dwarf plants for a patio planter or garden border etc. I will have them there! Succulent collector? I will have a mess of great choices this year.

Tales of the summiting of Aneroid Mt, Oregons 9th highest mountain peak and the flowers we found along the way! From the Wallowas to the Siskiyous and the Gifford Pinchot to the John Day Wilderness this talk has some of the best of the Northwest Mountain flowers.

Don’t miss this chance to get some of the illahe treasures you need for your garden! I will bring a few things up in the shuttle pot size that I don’t ship so this is a chance to get stuff that isn’t even in our catalog.

Want to know where I found this beauty? You’ll have to be at the Bellevue Botanical Garden this Thursday at 7pm.

Rare creeping Veronica’s, Tiny Erigerons, Micro Dianthus, NW native Penstemons, rare desert Agave and Dudleyas, Phlox, Anenaria, Androsace, etc etc. it will be for sale at NW Chapter NARGS meeting!

For those of you who can’t make the drive to Seattle I will get the Online catalog for shipping updated at the end of this week or over the weekend. I’ll send another update when it goes live, I put the list back up with sold outs so you can start making your list now, there will also be a good selection of new offerings not in the first offering. Stay tuned!

I was listening to some old Jerry Garcia and this lyric kinda stuck out to me:

“Since it costs a lot to win and even more to lose
You and me bound to spend some time wonderin' what to choose
Goes to show, you don't ever know
Watch each card you play and play it slow?

100 days, played pretty much all the cards he had and now we are all losing. Sure is costing us a lot to do all this losing. My heart is breaking knowing that future generations may never know the magic of Public Broadcasting. A whole slew of kids raised without Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, the reading rainbow. Man, those were simple times. As I got older and got into woodworking as a serious hobby it was the New Yankee Workshop that kept me inspired, this old house was always a good one. And what would those dateless highschool and college Friday nights have been without Austin City limits, I still remember seeing the the 1978 performance of Tom Waits at midnight on Friday night it was PBS and I was having my mind blown how music and performance could be melted into art, and poured out like a candle in a mold to be burned down again and make a sheet of wax that gets thrown out on the sidewalk to make a greasey spot in the asphalt. Trust me I am not a jazz fan but that performance of Burma Shave! Holy hell that is something else. My best friend says he sounds like kermit the frog, but I love it. Oh, man, what about the muppets, who didn’t love the muppets, everyone can relate to one of those oddball characters, My favorite aunt always reminded me of Miss Piggy, with her flair and style, maybe it was kermit playing the banjo that gave me a love of bluegrass music, the grumpy old men making comments on everything, maybe that is me now. A struggling rock band, an offbeat comedian, the scientist, or maybe the warnings we all should have seen coming from Sam the Eagle? Dang, a generation raised without the muppets, it’s a scary world that is coming at us. Losing all the way. The last 20 years it’s been all Ken Burn documentaries for me, but my ex wife and I used to love a good Antiques Roadshow. It’s hard to imagine a world where we trade the small price of all of this for some weapons of mass destruction. Trading education for death machines, that’s the new reality. Missiles and titanium nose cones for fighter jets, that cost more than most people can ever fathom seeing in a lifetime, but designed only to separate flesh from bone. Don’t have to guess what the end game is with that new budget, If you have young kids or grandkids, they will be drafted when the wars start. Weren’t they trying to cut spending, while then raising the debt ceiling so they could build a bigger war machine? Your children don’t need to learn how to read or write or count, or have empathy or understanding like we used to learn on childhood shows on public broadcasting, they need to learn to fine tune AI robots and target drones with impunity, and before the war starts they need to learn how to sew sneakers in factories. America is losing hard, the world will move on without us, they will move on with art and science, and funding the humanities. The dollar is crashing, and soon enough they will replace it with bitcoins and we will owe credits at birth to be worked off over a lifetime and when you look back to see when it all started to change you can think about when they cut the funding for the tv station that showed the muppets and sesame street.

It sure does cost a lot to lose in America these days.

Here is a story about gambling and losing: