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Welcome! As "Annie in Austin" I blog about gardening in Austin, TX with occasional looks back at our former gardens in Illinois. My husband Philo & I also make videos - some use garden images as background for my original songs, some capture Austin events & sometimes we share videos of birds in our garden. Come talk about gardens, movies, music, genealogy and Austin at the Transplantable Rose and listen to my original songs on YouTube. For an overview read Three Gardens, Twenty Years. Unless noted, these words and photos are my copyrighted work.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

For those who are "Apes at Heart"





This post was written for Annie's Addendum by Annie in Austin.



The Garden Bloggers Book Club selection for November was Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perényi. When Ms Perényi refers to an engraving from 1841 in her chapter on tree houses, some of us could look at the engraving as we read the book, but others, like Entangled from "Cultivated" were left guessing as to this reference. Why? When the book was published in 1981 the tree house was on the cover but the cover has changed with recent editions.


My copy is the old one with the mid-Nineteenth century tree house on the cover. I think Eleanor Perényi would like you to see what she was seeing as she wrote so I've posted it, and hope that the photo will enlarge if you click. What's the trick to that?

The title of this post is a quote from her wonderful book, "Tree houses acknowledge that we are still apes at heart.....I have before me an engraving of a maple carved into a three-story pavilion complete with windows and a roof with a finial. It is dated 1841 ... although I have been unable to discover exactly what were the techniques employed."



This post is part of my review of Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perényi, posted on the Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.