Saturday, July 6, 2013

"Medicinal" Gardening and Cartman (NPR)

Wisdom Quarterly; Margot Adler (NPR.org); New York Botanical Garden (nybg.org)

The Italian Renaissance garden inspired by one at Padua from 1645 (Margot Adler/NPR)
   
The Renaissance Garden at the New York Botanical Garden (nybg.org), a recreation of a 16th-century medicinal garden, is so lush and colorful, it only takes a stroll through to absorb its good medicine.

The garden, part of a summer exhibit called Wild Medicine: Healing Plants Around the World. is a small-scale model of the 16th-century Italian Renaissance Garden at Padua, Europe's first botanical garden.

Forests are the Earth's sustenance and key to its salvation (treehugger.com)
 
Biofuel worse than petrol? (BBC)
The landscape includes Mediterranean flowers in multiple colors, fountains, and odd plants that many people have never seen, like the opium poppy, with its unusual seed pods. The garden in Padua was created in 1545 as part of the University of Padua medical school, one of the earliest and most important medical schools in Europe.
  
The opium poppy, the most common source of opium and morphine.
Opium poppy (Adler/NY Botanical Garden)
"The medical school in Padua started in 1222," explains Gregory Long, president and CEO of the New York Botanical Garden... 
Cartman on NPR
Julie Rovner (Weekend Edition, 2008)
WARNING: Vile, disturbing, graphic language, hate, egotism, racism, profanity, comedy!

Pint sized misanthrope, Eric Cartman
Eric Cartman [a sensitive and deeply misunderstood boy who cares deeply about frogs if not ecosystems] is by far the most famous of the four foul-mouthed grade-schoolers who inhabit the cardboard-cutout town of South Park on Comedy Central. In fact, he ranked No. 10 on a TV Guide list of the Top 50 cartoon characters of all time. As South Park's major villain, it's Cartman who often provokes the action. It's Cartman who steals the speedboat that breaks the dam that floods a nearby town, causing misplaced hysteria about global warming in the episode "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow." More

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