Month: September 2021

We were supposed to be on the beach earlier this month, but it didn’t happen. I was thinking about staying at The Lodge at Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores. It’s one of the least Hilton-feeling Hiltons, built with an emphasis on eco-friendliness.

The design was meant to, compared to other typical facilities, reduce energy usage by 32% and interior water use by 35%. About 3/4 of the construction waste was recycled, and the makeup of the building materials consisted of 15% recycled.

We had a room with a king bed and two bunk beds…the kids love this setup.

It was adequate with enough storage; not the kind of plush where you say to yourself “I can’t wait to get back to the room!” but a clean design and really straight-forward.

The only thing that we didn’t especially enjoy: the balcony was really small, and the chairs not particularly comfortable.

Our view, though, terrific:

The outdoors common area:

A view of the hotel and conference center from the beach:

This is pre-Covid, so pics of the breakfast may be different than what they’re doing currently

…and an omelet chef on duty, who did a pretty great job:

Feeling really good about staying here.  They’ve achieved “SITES Platinum, LEED Gold, and Fortified Commercial Certification, becoming the first SITES hospitality project in the world and the first certified Fortified™ Commercial Building in the world.”

We visited the Shakespeare Garden in the Wynton M. Blount Cultural Park in Montgomery; it’s just outside the grounds of the Shakespeare Festival which is putting on Macbeth early next year, a play I think I saw there back in high school. My favorite way to read Shakespeare then: those books with his language on one side of the fold, and everyday English on the other.

The garden here includes plants and Elizabethan herbs mentioned in Shakespeare’s poems and plays. It’s maintained by the Capital City Master Gardeners.

The plants here include rosemary, honeysuckle, Asiatic lilies, narcissus and roses.

This plaque reads

Rose
Rosa “LaMarque”

“When I have pluck’d the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again.”
OTHELLO 5.2.13

The plaque for rosemary reads:

Rosemary
Rosemarinus prostratus

“There’s rosemary,
that’s for remembrance…”
HAMLET 4.5.176

In Shreveport, we visited the Biblical Garden & Orchard at Agudath Achim — it was started just last year.

Here’s a Biblical Garden in Rhode Island with markers that “show how each plant is connected to Jewish tradition, the Bible, and the Land of Israel.”

The best known, most established of these may be at Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh. From their website:

Enter a replica of ancient Israel in our Biblical Botanical Garden with more than 100 temperate and tropical plants. See the land of the Bible, the Holy Land, in a setting with a cascading waterfall, a desert, a bubbling stream, the Jordan, which meanders through the garden from Lake Kineret to the Dead Sea.

Gibeau Orange Julep
Montreal QC, 2005.

Simpson’s Florist
Decatur AL, 2019.

This spring, I took the boys and another family we’re in a pod with to Ave Maria Grotto in my hometown of Cullman, Alabama. It was a gorgeous day, the azaleas were in full bloom, and we took what felt like a thousand pictures.

At the end, though, a surprise — we were invited by a volunteer to enter Brother Zoettle’s workshop — the space that the artist/creator of Ave Maria Grotto utilized to make his pieces. It’s being cleaned, organized, and restored, and we got to see the tools and collections that were used to construct his original works.

The Grotto website explains that Br Zoettl was a Benedictine Monk of St Bernard Abbey here, and that he grew up in Landschutt, Bavaria-Germany. The Grotto has hosted people since 1934 to see his works in miniature.

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And:

More pics of the Grotto and of the Abbey church here.
Straight to Ale has a couple of beers named in Br Zoettl’s honor
A documentary, Brother Joseph and the Grotto:

Aaron Sanders Head‘s studio and gallery in Greensboro, Alabama

We went earlier this year and visited the studio of Aaron Sanders Head — a textile artist who was recently written up at Bitter Southerner

“More so than painting or sculpture, everybody has a relationship with textiles in some way,” he says. “No one really feels ostracized by a quilt, for the most part.”

…and if you’ve read enough about Greensboro and the Black Belt, you’ve undoubtedly come across a certain amount of outside hero worship for people who have come here from elsewhere. But Sambo was not that way. And Rural Studio stays humble, humble, humble, head down doing the work. And Aaron, too, says:

“Coming here was never part of a savior point of view, was never to come here and fix Greensboro — because it’s not broken,” he says as he clamps a lid back onto the indigo vat. “We want to use our existing talents to feed into what we saw here as already being a magical community.”

Aaron’s also teaching classes at Atlas Obscura on dyeing, and other sessions on quilting culture and practice.

When he does in-person classes again in Greensboro, I’d like to go with a friend and take a session or more on natural fiber dyeing. There are classes later this year in Mobile and Dallas.

The gallery showcases the work of other artists as well

And Sarah Cole’s Abadir’s Pastry was doing a pop-up on the weekend we were there, but it looks like she’s welcoming people to her bakery and other places now, the schedule updated on her IG.

We bought one of each on the stand above. Delicious.

 

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At ReckonSouth, a piece includes Aaron, Sarah, and Ian who is a professor at Alabama:

“Our plan is to help make Greensboro a spider web for artists,” says Tim, who’s busy writing songs and is looking forward to contributing to the local live music scene. “We want to make everybody come here.”

…“It’s a town with a pretty high threshold for weirdness, for new stuff and experimentation,” he says. In his experience, locals often ask him what he’s doing so they can help connect him with others who could help him out. “There’s a big infrastructure for support here that doesn’t exist in a bigger city.”

…“There are people who say, ‘I could never live in a small town,’” Ian says. “But they don’t know this one. It’s its own little world.”