April 2008
Features
Saying It Loud
Audacious, articulate, outspoken, raw, insightful—Nikki Giovanni has written deeply about love, anger, politics, and most recently, tragedy. Now, Kathy Y. Wilson goes deeper with the high priestess of Black poetry, a year after the shootings at Virginia Tech that brought her to the brink of heartbreak.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
There is much in the plant business that is punishing, if not downright ugly: exhausting days during the growing season; changeable weather and fickle consumers; the threat of fungus, pests, disease, and price-slashing competition. So perhaps it’s not surprising that in the last half-century, the number of
Garden States
Spring is crunch time for family owned greenhouses and nurseries, where generations are up to their elbows in the dirty work of nurturing everything from antique roses to sturdy saplings.
Columns
Lite Green Living
If you stepped into my office at work, you’d probably notice something that looks like a plastic flower, its circumference that of a small dinner plate, suction-cupped to my window. It’s a solar charger that, once it soaks in direct sunlight for about five hours, can power my iPod. How cool is it to listen to “I Can See Clearly Now” on an MP3 player powered by the sun? Pretty cool. More important, how cool is it for Mother Earth that my iPod