garden color

Color of course needs to be an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in plan­ning the gar­den. You may be famil­iar with Gertrude Jekyll’s impor­tant book devoted just to the sub­ject, Colour Scheme in the Flower Gar­den. If you don’t know it—or if you your copy is falling apart—you can read it for free online via Google Books. Her selec­tions of plants won’t apply to many loca­tions since she lived in Eng­land, but her thought processes about choos­ing col­ors and stag­ing pro­ces­sions of col­ors through­out the year col­ors are instruc­tive and worth the read.

You can find plenty of other gar­den books online through Google books. If they’re out of copy­right you can see the entire text. Even if they’re still under copy­right con­trol, you can skim through many others–usually enough to let you decide if you want to buy the book, and often enough to answer a spe­cific ques­tion that might be your only rea­son for want­ing to look at the book.

When Google started their mas­sive project to dig­i­tize items in many of the world’s major libraries they raised more than a few eye­brows. What were they up to? What were they doing scan­ning all these books and poten­tially releas­ing for free the hard work of the world’s authors?

I’ve just fin­ished The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edi­son to Google by Nicholas Carr. It’s def­i­nitely a work of jour­nal­ism and not poetry, but a para­graph on page 223 made my jaw drop and just by itself made read­ing the book worthwhile:

George Dyson, a his­to­rian of technology…was invited to Google’s head­quar­ters in Moun­tain View, Cal­i­for­nia, in Octo­ber 2005 to give a speech… After his talk, Dyson found him­self chat­ting with a Google engi­neer about the company’s con­tro­ver­sial plant to scan the con­tents of the world’s libraries into its data­base. “We are not scan­ning all those books to be read by peo­ple,” the engi­neer told him. “We are scan­ning them to be read by an AI [Arti­fi­cial Intelligence].”

Creepy. But at least in the end, when Google’s com­put­ers take over the world, they’ll at least be able to put together a color-coordinated Eng­lish cot­tage garden.

July 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: • • • • | 1 Comment »