This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to pick a word and find ten books where it’s contained in the title. April and May are the months when I spend a lot of time planting (and, this year, watering), so I thought I’d share ten books from my to-be-read list that contain the word “garden” in one form or another:

1. In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente
2. The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn
3. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
4. Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols
5. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
6. Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game by John Thorn
7. Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens by Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil
8. Garden Spells by Sarah Allen Addison (I think I picked this one up at a library sale when I was staying in Connecticut and left it with my mother.)
9. The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos (Goodreads informs me I own this book, which is a surprise to me.)
10. The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

Have you read any of these? Do you have other gardeny reads you’d recommend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rebecca and I walk across town after coaching to catch up on how life is going. And my upstairs neighbors, Ryan and the delightful golden puppy Miller, walk partway back from the park with me this evening, before I break away to do my grocery shopping.

2. The connecting bus I need does not show up, which means I am later than intended arriving at the Arlington library — and the closest door is already locked. But the library is open for three more minutes! So I sprint to another door and then across to the holds shelf, where a book I’ve been waiting for is about to go to the net person on the list. The librarian comes over — “Don’t run! I’ll check you out!” she kindly assures me.

3. Rudi and I were separately looking through photos to print and we both commented on how much the cats have grown: “Coal was so tiny! He curled up in my bowl!” And, “Remember how much Ember hated when we played music?!” But somehow, surprisingly, six months have passed since they moved in with us, and none of us can imagine the world any other way.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. It was cold and rainy last Friday, so Rudi and I went and bought seedlings for the garden — endive, herbs, strawberries, beets, and flowers. It made us feel very cheerful about the spring gardening season. Now I just need to finish putting it all into the ground!

2. One of the things that I grow in the garden are violets, and the image above is why. When you pick a single violet, you don’t get the scent. If you pick an entire nosegay, on the other hand, you are treated to a gentle, but heavenly perfume that fades after a day or so.

3. Even though our local schools are on spring break this week, my coaching volunteer gig kicked off its outdoor season. It was good to see my fellow coaches and to get to start teaching kids volleyball again.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

After a slow start, I ended up finishing seven books during March, several of which I enjoyed quite a bit:

A Lady’s Guide to Marvels and Misadventure by Angela Bell

Not going to lie: If I’d known this was going to be Christian lit (albeit one that believes in women’s rights and science), I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. If you can put up with some mostly mild proselytizing with your steampunk, it’s worth reading this international scavenger hunt that Clara’s beloved inventor grandfather sets up for his uptight granddaughter, his footloose protege, and (in her role as chaperone) his animal-loving daughter (they’re traveling with a zoo by the end of the book). After realizing his granddaughter has become stuck in the role of caregiver (even when such a role is unneeded), he sets off anonymously in the gigantic owl flying machine he built with instructions that she and her traveling companions must follow in order to catch up with him before the newspapers do.

Paper from the library. (more…)

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The UConn women won the NCAA Division 1 basketball championship by a considerable margin. I was really glad to see Paige get her big win and for UConn to take home its 12th title.

2. Chris, Neal, and I went out for supper at a well-respected Filipino restaurant in Mount Pleasant. The food was delicious, and it was great to spend some time off the court with the two of them.

3. Baseball season has begun, and we got to our first Nationals game of the season on the chilliest day in weeks. (Rudi and I love going to spring and fall baseball games.) The Nats won decisively, holding the World Series champs to just a handful of runs and Ohtani to a single hit (he did then steal two bases, but we didn’t challenge him, given the score and the temperatures, which were in the looooow 40s).

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi is home and put back together in one piece.

2. I went out to the park to read Monday afternoon, and while my phone assured me that we weren’t due for rain for several hours, Mother Nature had other ideas. By the time I realized I was going to get very wet on my way back home, I decided to stick around to see if a rainbow would appear. And lo! Not one, but two! (I finished the latest Linda Holmes novel, in which the protagonist also gets caught in a D.C. afternoon rainstorm, from the steps outside the Phillips Collection.)

3. There’s a house in the neighborhood, where the owners take a great deal of care with their front garden. The daffs and early bulbs are past, but the tulips are out now in force.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world as March transitions to April?