All our thanks for your compassion–and lots of kitten kisses too!

…children’s books from illustrator Brian Wildsmith.

Lush, saturated, heart-leapingly joyful, his paintings bathe even the alphabet with a riotous sunny grace. Please don’t miss Hunter and His Dog, which twirls animal rehabilitation into a timeless fairy tale.

“We once had a blind dog that was mothered by a neighborhood dog. I was quite impressed by this and learned that animals show a great deal of compassion for one another. When I paint animals, I imagine them as a child would.” More at brianwildsmith.com.

Spotted: new growth among the lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantine). I can’t resist caressing its leaves whenever I pass—if you’ve never felt them before, do try to find some and sneak in a little grope. Fleecy fibers, deeper than velvet. The texture is a sensation, but they’re beautiful plants too: luminous arctic silver, soft dawny pink, and violet, and the new growth icy green.

Like many of the plants we love as friends, lamb’s ears started out straggling and wild, this time in the scrubby hills of Turkey and Iran. A scrappy weed with startling and unneeded beauty, like Queen Anne’s lace. In Europe it earned the name “woundwort” when leaves were used as bandages, silvery shelter for the body’s open places. More delightful, they served as washcloths—and if the idea of tending to your body with clear water and velvet-skinned new leaves doesn’t make you smile, then it’s been winter far too long.

…just around the corner, bringing gifts.

Field guide to the daffodils courtesy of design*sponge.

Namibia. Have you been there? It’s my latest travel obsession. Centuries of shipwrecks along the Skeleton Coast, abandoned mining towns drowning in the dunes… must… go see…

photos: africatamed, mental floss, light and land

The infinite glamour of owls. Courtesy of the divine Regretsy.

echoed in the park’s empty branches

One is just as beautiful as two. Happy Valentine’s Day to us all.

“One by one, like leaves from a tree,
All my faiths have forsaken me;
I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.
But the little leaves that die
Have left me room to see the sky.
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below.”
-Sara Teasdale, 1917