Wednesday Links:

Starting off this week with celebrity gossip: Gardening is Nicole Kidman's stress-buster, according to the Times of India.

A nice piece on composting that doesn't follow the rules from the Christian Science Monitor -- a piece I can totally get behind, as I never make a proper compost pile -- I just throw stuff in a mound, and eventually, it breaks down. Patience is all you need

From MATT Kinase, aka The Scientist Gardener: A virus that melts caterpillars. Yes MELTS. It is really cool, but in a really gross way.

Here is the US news papers are busy publishing their best songs or movies or books of the decade ending, but in the UK (where they understand gardening) the Telegraph has a piece on the decade in gardening with a major emphases on the naturalistic design ideas of the amazing Piet Oudolf (see my pictures of the Oudolf designed Lurie garden in Chicago here). Reading stuff like this makes me so jealous of the Brits. This article honest to goodness discusses the "signature color combination of the late Nineties" as being Dahlia Bishop of Llandaff and Verbena bonariensis. Can you name the signature color combination of ANY decade in the US? Besides green lawn and too much dyed wood chip mulch?

Funny post on Cactus Blindness (the inability to tell different species of cacti apart) from Plants are the Strangest People

Great book review from Zanthan Gardens -- I confess to being a total essay addict, so to learn about a new (to me) book of gardening essays is always a treat.

By way of Garden Rant: Looking at nature makes us nicer

Extreme guerilla gardening -- planting 200 trees to protest a proposed shopping center! And the town isn't even going to remove them! Gotta love the Brits.

Looks like one thing to come out of Copehagen is a system to pay countries to preserve forest lands. The article includes the surprising (to me) statistic that rainforest destruction accounts for 20% of global CO2 emissions. Really? That's crazy.