garden variety

Housed in a deconsecrated church and owing its existence to landscape artist, botanist and curio collector John Tradescant the Younger who designed the surrounding gardens and was entombed there along with twenty-thousand other souls, London’s unique Garden Museum is reopening after a year and a half of careful renovation that protected the character of the medieval structure.
The structure was abandoned and slated for demolition in the early 1970s until it was saved and converted into a celebration of garden design and history by an impassioned couple, with exhibits on the social and practical aspects of the craft. Tradescant (1608*-1662†) frequently made excursions to the new world and introduced many new varieties of plant-life (the taxonomy of many flowers are so named in his honour) to England and acquired in his travels new artefacts to add to his familial cabinet of curiosities—the Ark, which was the first collection of its kind put on public view in England and included a specimen of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. The Ark was also seed that germinated into the Ashmolean collections of Oxford but has been reunited with its curator and is now also to be found in a niche of St Mary-at-Lambeth’s.

crest and trough

As Kottke informs, during one of its final passes of the Saturn system, the Cassini probe (previously) delivers an image of a spiral density wave in one of the planets rings that illustrates the complexity and nuance of gravitational relationships. The ripples are caused by the waltz of two satellites, Janus and Epimetheus, which share the same orbital path and trade places as leader and follower with a period of four years. Like extracting historical data from tree growth rings, gauging the distance between the waves reveal details about past trajectories.

plane-spotting

Hurricane Irma is still unleashing her wrath and is leaving a path of destruction in her wake including the famed Maho Beach of Sint Maarten, where visitors could formerly watch the aircraft take-off and land on the nearby runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Directly under the flight path of aircraft, airliners passed just thirty metres overhead but the spectacle was not without its dangers and risk to observers.

stop the presses

Though sometimes expository headlines and news segments in film can make for lazy story-telling, we’re rather enamoured with Movie Heds, introduced to us by the always marvellous Nag on the Lake. We’re given the license to reclaim our fake news as a narrative arc by pausing to appreciate the layout and formatting that’s gone into fictional copy-editing.

carriage return

Serendipitously, coming across this article in Amusing Planet about the green cabmen’s shelters of London that date back to one particularly blustery morning in 1875 when no cabs could be hailed as all the drivers were hunkered down in a pub (absent any other place to go without leaving their horses unattended) and in no mood to brave the elements keyed us onto what this grey structure might be that we pass downtown on a regular basis.
To remedy the situation and to discourage drink-driving, a group of philanthropists commissioned the building of sheds scattered throughout the city that could house (rather trans-dimensionally, like another London street icon) a dozen drivers and was equipped with a full-kitchen with subsidised meals. Thirteen out of sixty-one original shelters remain and are still in operation and the exclusive reserve of taxi drivers. If Wiesbaden ever had such a hide-away for cabbies, it’s certainly no longer accommodating. See a gallery of the little buildings plus take a peek inside at the link up top.