in a further rare evidence of readership, Stephen Vincent makes a comment below to put me and the less verifiable readers of this blog on to a book by Michael Pollan "Second Nature". which I should like to read (and categorize!). I am much taken with the picture I have in my mind of Thoreau sitting in the doorway of his cabin (see below, altho that replica sits about 1/2 mile from where HDT had it), frying up his johnnycakes, writing in his journal. he was single-minded in his curiosity. sometimes he's such a nut, like his suggestion that you could make a nice home out of a coffin-sized railroad box. which you could (if protection from rain when you slept were your main concern), but try to convince the good folk. to read Thoreau is to confront the current boundaries. Walden, as I've mentioned, is much fenced in, and there's no hope of trying to follow the crow's flightpath to the places he mentions in his journal, the land covetously belongs to somebody else. anyway, it is fun to imagine Thoreau's enormous beanfield, since the land is now thickly forested where he grew his beans. and now I lament the garden I will leave. terraforming a patch of grass into a wildness of flowering things has been a distracted pleasure for me. my gardening dwindled due to lack of time, lack of money, lack of energy. a drought stressed it, our penchant for going away at peak weed time didn't help, and moles/voles killed off bulbs, hosta and such like to devastating degree. so now it is a garden of super bad hardy types: daylily and daffodil (I love them both), plus interesting intruders like wilkweed and goldenrod, both of which, I am told, are cherished in European gardens, weeds tho they may seem hereabouts. Williams advising: leave the dirt on the roots...