The Professor and Mary Ann

I had seen pictures of the Gardens of the World on advertisements by the BVG (the transportation department in Berlin). Once we came out here on Saturday I realized that is because you have to take a lot of transportation in order to get there! S-bahn lines were down, so we took the S-bahn to the U-bahn to the back of beyond where we caught a bus to JVD (which means 'way, way out there'). First, we made our way through the irrgarten. It was not so easy! I was completely turned around by the time I found the middle, and that's only half done. Next we went to the Chinese garden. I was hungry and there was a pagoda, so we sat and ate our lunch there. People eventually began to act like themselves again. The chinese garden was really beautiful. All designed by landscape designers from Bejing, which is a sister city of Berlin complete with lake and tea house. They even imported Chinese rocks. Then off to the Italian garden with a renaissance theme. Joss never did fall asleep, w...

All of Rob's maintenance has come to an abrupt halt, though he barely makes it to work before noon each day. Instead, you'll always find him out in the garden, trying to convince his plants to grow faster and bigger on the strength of his attention to them. That and digging in the compost take up the lion's share of his time. If I have a cool early morning hour when he's not out there, I pull weeds by the handful; he thought it was just a weedless garden until he caught me at it one day. The rhubarb is nearly gone, after giving us pudding cakes and pies and muffins and jam. The strawberries have produced perhaps a dozen tiny but flavorful berries. We've eaten salad, chard or spinach nearly every other night, though they're almost all gone or bolted now. In their heyday Joss would rip off leaves and eat them right there in the side yard. Rob also showed him where the peas were and how to harvest them and the rest of us barely saw one -- good thing they were edib...