Good Old Ideas [NOT 14/5/24]

14/5/24 brightersideoflife 19

Hi, friends!

If you’re ever in St Louis, you need to find time to spend a few hours at Missouri Botanical Gardens. It’s amazing. And one of my favorite spots is this little garden tucked in a far corner – a stumpery. They only completed it in 2017 and it’s been growing in nicely after a few years.

Never heard of a stumpery? It’s a garden type started by some Victorians where you intentionally used tree stumps, root balls, driftwood, fallen trees, etc as the main structural components. It’s great for plants that can’t take full sun, and also great for showing off moss, ferns, and mushrooms due to the damp and shady pockets it creates.

I love the idea for a few reasons. First – it takes something of minimal use for formal gardening and makes it an integral part of the garden. Letting that organic matter slowly decay back into the ground is good for the soil too, plus the stumps create great habitat for frogs, birds, insects, etc.

Second – it’s the complete opposite of the concept of Victorian gardening. It’s not symmetrical with geometric patterns and blanketing with a ton of the exact same flowers. There’s no trimming to have perfect lines or edges. It’s just left to be natural shaping.

Are there other old ideas that you learned about as an adult where you were like hmm, that’s a cool thing I wish more people did?

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19 Comments

  3. I could also throw in driving in a standard/manual transmission car.

    Maybe not, having a standard transmission kept various shitheads from stealing my old (non EV) car (because they can’t drive stick.)

  4. And the return of the meme stock… but why?

    If they do it to fuck with short sellers… okay but I’m just glad I don’t any BB stock anymore. Those fuckers made it rain for me because I rode it all the way from $5 to $30 CDN in the span of 3 weeks (I owned it for several months prior to that.) Sold @ $30 but I squandered much of the earnings on what became bullshit stocks…

    Easy come, easy go.

    • I think you’re right! Both require a considerable about of downed tree materials. Most of the stumpery materials here come from the Shaw Nature Reserve, which is also owned by the Gardens and is a 2400 acre area about 35 miles southwest of St Louis. It was necessary to get that land in the 1920s because the coal smoke and other pollution was so bad in St Louis that they had to move the delicate plants (orchids, etc) out there where the air was literally cleaner to keep them alive! Excellent hiking trails there now!

  6. We have walking trails that were zoned commercial that our city & community got rezoned to a city park.  It is the most amazing mix of forest & wetlands with so many ferns, fungi, moss, triliums, native plants in the shade of a huge forest.  So much wildlife too that some you rarely see & some you see all the time.  I am very lucky to live on the edge of such a magnificent place & I will die here before I ever move.

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