The first lawn-makers in late Renaissance England wanted to flaunt their wealth by replicating the look of a sheep-shorn pasture in their front yard. Some even went to the extent of incorporating actual sheep. In addition to visual charm, the sheep handled the mowing and fertilizing chores in exchange for room and board. You probably […]
Frank Hyman
Posted inGuides
Casa, Spring 2006: The American lawn, unplugged
Don’t get me wrong. I come here not to bury the American lawn, but to shrink it. (Let’s bury all the gas mowers, instead.)
Posted inNews
End Durham’s painful school board experiment
We’ve all heard about Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments at Yale in which average citizens would willingly give painful electric shocks to people who answered test questions incorrectly. The experiment showed that even goodhearted people will do harm in a dysfunctional environment. In that case, the dysfunctional environment was an isolated room where authority figures in […]
Posted inNews
Trick or sweet
The look on my wife’s face told me that she didn’t think handing out sugar packets at Halloween would be as funny in practice as it sounded in conversation. “But Chris, I’ll have honey packets and cane sugar packets for the granola kids.”
Posted inNews
Swing voters
The bowl of marshmallows looked out of place next to the cheese and crackers. “They’re for Bush. To throw.” Oh. Cool. I had a friend years ago who kept a block of red-painted Styrofoam next to his La-Z-Boy. “A TV brick,” he said. “For when they say something stupid, I can do more than scream […]
Posted inNews
In Durham Elections, Endorsements Matter
Political action committee endorsements in Durham have a reputation for making and breaking the careers of politicians. Durham’s recent Democratic primaries for county commissioner, district attorney, sheriff and clerk of court revealed a lot about that power. In fact, in my almost 15 years of looking at election results, this year’s tally provides the most […]
Posted inNews
Keeping time
I was a banjo widow at a fiddler’s convention once. My partner at the time had a heart like a hurricane lamp and a laugh that could blow a big man down. She played a mean claw hammer banjo and no sooner had we set up camp than she was outta my sight for most […]
Posted inNews
Scorched earth
I was tooling down the road to Southern Pines when I heard the news about the wildfire on the radio. A controlled burn out West had leapt the fire line and threatened the nuclear town of Los Alamos, N.M. It was the morning of my first class in fire management, and I was suddenly a […]
Posted inGuides
Pretty Good Landscaping
The most significant comment I can make about the landscaping at the new West Village apartments in downtown Durham concerns what the developers, Blue Devil Ventures, chose not to do. You won’t see several of the most overrated and problematic trees and shrubs possible in the Triangle: Bradford pears, red-tip photinia or Leyland cypress. Unfortunately, […]
Posted inNews
Wasting Our Waste
As coincidences go, it was a meager one. A few months back, I was reading an article about irate Orange County citizens fighting a construction and demolition (C&D) waste landfill, proposed for the northeastern part of the county. The proposal died because of that opposition, leaving Orange County with perhaps as little as six months’ […]
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