A Garden of Love and Healing: Living Tributes to Those We Have Loved and Lost

Book Description

This book presents creative ideas for setting aside a special section of the garden to honor those who have touched our lives.

Customer Reviews:

Unique Ideas for Beautiful Memories.......2003-03-20

"For every flower than opens in your garden, another wound is healed in your heart." -Unknown

"A Garden of Love & Healing" is a book filled with unique ideas for creating a living tribute to those you have loved and lost. Marsha Olson shows you how to create a memory garden which can be elaborate or a single tree. This garden can be created in your own backyard or in a public space.

In order to create your garden, Marsha gives information on the symbolism of plants, common garden themes and guides for preparation, installation and maintenance of a garden. She also explains remembrance rituals.

Throughout the book, the author shares personal stories and photographs of actual memory gardens. You will notice they are places where you can wander through, stepping on smooth stones or where you can sit on a chair or bench. These are places for reflection.

The chapters include:

Nature's Healing Spirit
Giving Your Garden Meaning
Garden Themes
Preparing, Installing, and Maintaining Your Garden
Accessories for a Memory Garden
Dedicating Your Garden
Final Thoughts

Through this book, you can learn which flowers represent the month you lost your loved one or what the color of the flowers you choose symbolizes. If you were to make a garden for a friend, you might wish to plant "zinnia: thoughts of absent friends."

You might also want a "theme" garden and you may want to plant:

An Herb Garden of Memory
A Meditation Garden
A Patriotic Garden
A Spring Garden of Memory
A Monet Garden for an Artist
A Bird and Butterfly Garden

Some of the pictures have a name engraved in stone surrounded by plants. "A Garden of Love & Healing" is for those who want to honor the legacy of a beautiful soul who touched their life in a meaningful way.

Note:

While this book is specifically for memorial gardens, there is also a great amount of information on the meanings of flowers and page after page of "The Victorian Language of Flowers" which is an extensive list. There is also a list of Selected Plants arranged by common name with their botanical name, type, zone and light needs. This book might also be helpful for florists or for anyone who wants to create a garden to honor a living relative or friend. Wouldn't it be beautiful to create a garden for someone you love while they could enjoy it? This book has many possibilities.

Gardening is definitely therapeutic and it helps take your mind off your worries and stress in everyday life.

~TheRebeccaReview.com

An Atmosphere of Affirming Life: Living Tributes.......2002-09-15

I am delighted to review this beautiful book because it offers such creative and healing ideas for affirming and celebrating life throughout one of life's most difficult passages, the loss of a loved one. It offers myriad ideas for creating garden tributes, places of beauty and solace where we can honor lost loved ones in an atmosphere of peace and hope. This book is filled with useful ideas and directions for physically creating garden retreats, large and small, but it is also brimming with compassionate and sensitive advice for grieving people. It's meditative tone gently creates a vibration of healing and an appreciation for the cycle and interconnected web of life. It helps us to connect with Nature's healing spirit. It offers a list of plants representing each month, discusses the symbolism of color, touches on the Victorian language of flowers, as well as several themes and their associated plants. These lists are detailed and out of the ordinary. They are filled with thought and care and are diverse enough to suit most any need. Poignant quotations and the personal thoughts of others surviving loss grace the book throughout and help one to relate and open to healing as if in the company of gentle friends.
Many different garden themes are suggested, of varying sizes and complexity, such as an herb garden of memory, a meditation garden, a patriotic garden, a garden in remembrance of a baby, a bird and butterfly garden, among several. Sporadic photographs illustrate the book and lend inspiration as well. Descriptions of several famous memorial gardens are described such as The Danny Thomas Memorial Garden near St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis and the Wrigley Memorial Garden on Catalina Island.
Sometimes getting busy and putting our body to work is the most therapeutic thing we can do for ourselves when we are hurting and this book suggests that principle in the chapter that explains how prepare, install and maintain your garden.
Suggestions for accessories such as trellises, bird baths, chairs, benches, plaques, engraved stones, statues and artifical lighting are discussed. Dedications for the garden are discussed. All in all, it is a very effective book in terms of nuts and bolts how-to advice, but its most precious gift, one which I feel every grieving person could benefit from, is the holistic perspective that it restores to a heart rent with loss and pain. By inviting us to be creative and to pay tribute with our own talents, ideas, efforts and physical work to someone we have lost, it gives us an opportunity to go inward and search out the best and most life-touching attributes of our loved one and the gifts and meaning that the relationship gave to our lives. It helps us to gently shift our focus away from loss and look toward legacy. To be remembered is something that most of us hope for and this lovely book will help greatly in the process that brings us through to remembering the life rather than the loss. I highly recommend it.

A highly recommended guide to celebrating beloved memories.......2002-05-07

A Garden Of Love & Healing: Living Tributs To Those We Have Loved And Lost by grief counselor and experienced landscape/garden designer is not a traditional gardening guide, but rather a book for experienced gardeners who wish to create and dedicate their growing in the memory of a loved one. From choosing plants with the right traditional meaning to embracing the healing spirit of nature, A Garden Of Love & Healing is a gentle, thoughtful, unique, highly recommended guide to celebrating beloved memories through the art of nurturing and growing plant life.

Book Description

500 geometrical designs suitable for many graphic, decoupage uses; shimmering, dazzling, baffling. 8 plates in color.

Optical and Geometrical Patterns and Designs 500 Original Designs

Average customer rating:

Optical and Geometrical Patterns and Designs 500 Original Designs
Spyros Horemis
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000MTNZYM

Book Description

Grimmy is back! And he's funnier than ever in this brand-new collection from Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Peters. Grimmy is the wisecracking, opinionated, cat-terrorizing, postman-chasing, freeloading bon vivant who brings delighted smiles to the faces of his millions of adoring fans in the enormously popular cartoon strip Mother Goose and Grimm.

Customer Reviews:

A heartwarming & humorous story........2004-07-19

This story is one that you won't want to put down until you've read the whole thing. It's one of those that will bring back the "warm fuzzy" feeling you got as a child. The book includes many humorous stories & focuses around the time of Red Skelton, Gunsmoke, Black Jack gum, Teaberry gum etc. The story also includes some of the difficult and sad times a family endured but stuck together through it all. The grandpa and grandma are now in their 80s and continue to bale hay and work on their farm as they did almost 40 years ago. The grandpa still goes to the pulp woods & helps his sons with that business. If you enjoy reminiscing you'll love this book. Would be a great gift idea for "Grandparents Day" coming up in September. Written in easy to read format.

Book Description

This book takes a hard look at the reasons why the government bureaucracy has failed as the nation's bill collector for child support...and how families get their money in only about one in five cases.

It's a national scandal that millions of fathers don't pay and get away with it. Their ex-wives and children often end (up on welfare af taxpayers' expense. Nationally, $50 billion is owed in back support.

This book is valuable to single parenets who need help in getting the child support they are entitled to. It offers help on how to obtain support, so that your family won't end up victims of a deadbeat dad, or in some cases, a deadbeat mom. The book is also meant for grandparents. who often must help support their daughter's children. Make The Jerk Pay goes beyond just explaining how to use the child support system. It tells how you can track down a missing spouse by using your own skills and available public records and the Internet. Beyond that. you will learn how to do some sleuthing to uncover money, property and other assets of the deadbeat.

Men may take offense at the book's title. But we consider it justified because nine out of ten deadbeats are men. For the custodial fathers trying to collect from deadbeat moms, this book is for you too.

Many men don't want the responsibility of being a father, so they end up divorcing their children as well as their wives. They run off, often moving from state to state. Some create new identities for themselves by changing their names and getting new Social Security numbers, new credit cards and driver's licenses.

They go to great lengths to conceal their assets from the families they abandon. Many arrange to be paid under the table so their earnings can not be traced or attached. Often they will flout court orders to pay child support, knowing they are likely to get away with it.

The tactics of deadbeat dads add up to a nightmare, financially and emotionally, for the mothers and children. Too often the mothers are left to fend for themselves at a time when they are least able to cope.

Many women will not even seek child support. They may fear hostility from their ex-husbands or partners, or feel that asking for child support is like asking for a handout.

Others shy away because they fear it will be costly, time-consuming and too much of a hassle to deal with the bureaucratic child support system.

If you are such a victim, you may feel abandoned and cheated. That's natural. Some women strike back by denying visitation rights to the father. That's a mistake. It hurts the child and gives the absent father an excuse for not paying child support.

But you need not feel that you are powerless. There are laws and state and county agencies which are supposed to help you. It's the responsibility of prosecutors and judges to aid you in getting support orders and enforcing them.

You can turn to support groups whose members know exactly what you are going through and can help you cope with the system. In the end, it's up to you to help find him and make him pay. Because you have the most at stake, you may have to become a squeaky wheel and pester child support officials to get your case moving.

There are countless mothers who have made the system work for them. You will read vignettes about some of these women and how they triumphed, often by the force of their will.

Customer Reviews:

Essential reading.............2006-11-02

As unsettling as this book is, every man who is contemplating marraige should read it. You will get some idea of the forces arrayed against you when your wife decides to call it quits and move on to her next victim.

Can't wait until the law is actually fair.......2006-03-10

Completely crazy! Warning! This is a bible for gold diggers. It's amazing that in the 21st century, 30 years after Roe v. Wade that some women and men, for that matter, are still pulling this garbage. The choice to be a parent is 50\50 and no, ladies, it does not have to be decided at orgasm. For 30 years, women in the United States have had the right to choose to be or not to be a parent after conception. Abandonement, abortion and adoption laws give all women the right to decide whether or not they want to be parents. Men do not have this choice. They never have. Men are just expected to take a huge responsibility without any choice. That's being adult? In what crazy world? Why do you think more than 50% of marriages end in divorce in this country? No one in the United States should be forced by anyone to be a parent-Or forced into marriage because of a child. Women aren't. Stop playing victims. It's childish. Stop getting "religious" at convenient times(i.e. when you're pregnant). Where was your religion and morals while you were having unprotected, irresponsible nonmarital sex?

Men should have the same legal choices that women have, barring abortion. A man should be able to for a certain period of time following conception or notification of paternity, legally relinquish his parental responsibilities-that includes financial. Women have this right. Why shouldn't men?

When you accidentally get pregnant ladies and the father tells you he doesn't want to have the child, either abort, adopt or abandone or GET A LIFE! and raise it yourself without dragging other people like the reluctant bio-father and the child, for that matter, into the mess you've made.

Don't accuse "fathers by force" of running from their "mistakes". Accept their choice for what it really is, an attempt to correct their "mistakes". By keeping the children, you're not necessarily correcting your mistake, you're just compounding it.

Very good tips on finding information about the ex.......2004-07-07

Very slanted writing! However, it does offer some very good tips on finding out information about the ex (which might be useful before filing, during the divorce, or after if she leaves with the kid(s)). Check it out. It might be a good idea to see what you can find out about yourself so you'll know what might come up in court.

Worth a read.......2001-11-20

I have read many books on this subject and this one stands out as one of my favorites. The author covers many different "situations" and discusses many ideas on how to collect back child support. A lot of research was put into this book and I found it all very helpful and full of interesting ideas and suggestions.

Terrific Guidelines!.......1999-07-21

Rose and Malone give us great, easily usable guidelines for tracking down anybody. These authors know their stuff. From schools to property to driving records to work records, we all leave tracks. Now we know how to make those tracks work for us! Deadbeat parents, look out now.

Book Description

The story of the Marathon campaign is an epic of the Ancient World. When the Ionian Greeks revolted against their Persian overlords in 499BC, the cities of Athens and Eretria came to their aid. The Persian King Darius swore vengeance and in 490BC a fleet of 600 ships packed with troops was sent to take revenge on the Athenians. At Marathon the Greeks met the Persians in battle and drove them in rout back to their ships. The moral effect of this victory was enormous – for the first time a Greek army had defeated the Persians and demonstrated the superiority of hoplite tactics.

Customer Reviews:

More Questions Than Answers........2006-05-25

Mr.Forczyk said it all. Granted that both the written and archaeological evidence is choppy at best. Still Mr.Sekunda failed to answer any pertinent questions. Yes, the Greeks were victorious and the Persians got hammered. We all knew that before we picked up this book. He does not give any insights into the how and why this campaign went as it did. He did not even present a cogent theory. I give the color plates and maps 4 stars and the text 2.

Iran.......2006-03-25

Saddly, this book was ommiting the whole history and sought to illsustarate that Greek were dominating force in the battle.

Archaeology, not Military History.......2003-01-09

Trying to write coherent military history about a battle that occurred almost 2,500 years ago is a daunting and problematic task. Written sources are few and often unreliable or fragmentary. Terrain can change so drastically over such a long period that simple things like determining the exact location of key events can be impossible. Artifacts such as weapons, equipment and human remains have usually deteriorated so much over the centuries that their use as interpretative tools is difficult and controversial. No one can argue that the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC - where Greeks defeated the first Persian invasion of their land - was a historically important action. Had the Greeks lost then or ten years later against the second invasion, there would have been serious historical repercussions on the development of later European culture and society. However, the task of writing a coherent Osprey campaign title on that subject is another matter. In Osprey's Campaign series volume 108, Marathon 490 BC, Polish archaeologist Nicholas Sekunda has decided to attempt this difficult task. Unfortunately, Sekunda's effort falls flat for a number of reasons - primarily because the volume is too oriented toward archaeological issues rather than military history. However another telling weakness is the slippery slope of interpretation built by every author who ever attempted to study Marathon; as Sekunda writes just before he begins his narrative of the battle, "the reader should be warned that virtually every account of the battle written reconstructs it [the battle] differently." If it is true as Sekunda suggests, that different authors could write different narratives of this battle due to the controversial and fragmentary nature of the evidence, then why should anyone read this account?

Marathon 490 BC begins with short sections on the origins of the campaign, opposing commanders, opposing armies and opposing plans. The campaign narrative is 55 pages in length, but the battle itself is covered in less than 6 pages. The volume concludes with a short aftermath, notes on visiting the battlefield today, a campaign chronology and a bibliography. Marathon 490 BC includes three 3-D "Birds Eye View" maps (the Battle of Marathon in three phases - deployment, Greek charge and Persian rout), and five 2-D maps (the Aegean in 499-492 BC, the campaign in the Cyclades, the campaign of Marathon, the plain of Marathon in 490 BC, and Marathon today). Three battle scenes by Richard Hook are also in the volume: Philippides before the Spartan ephors, the Athenian charge and the Athenian reach the Herakleion after the forced march back to Athens.

Reading Marathon 490 BC, several facts soon become apparent. First, that Sekunda is very well-versed in archaeology, very familiar with classical Greece and very familiar with the Marathon topography. Second, Professor Sekunda's methodology is erudite, but uninformative. He spends far too much time using the limited space of an Osprey volume to contest or illuminate various archaeological issues about the battle - issues that properly belong in an archaeological journal article, not a campaign summary. At the very least, Sekunda could have include some of his major points in an appendix, rather than choking the campaign narrative with tedious explanations of various diggings. Third, Professor Sekunda does not know how to write military history or to analyze facts of a military nature. For example, Sekunda advances the poorly-supported theory that the reason that the Persians divided their forces at Marathon was that they could not employ their cavalry advantage due to the possible Greek use of abatis obstacles. This is patently silly for several reasons that Sekunda obviously failed to grasp. The Persians were on the battlefield for almost five full days before the Greek army arrived, so the Persians could have employed their cavalry before the abatis were in place. Furthermore, where would the Greeks get the materials for abatis - Sekunda notes that the battlefield was mostly beach and marshland, with few trees. On the other hand, Sekunda also fails to ask the blindingly obvious question of why didn't the Persians employ obstacles to their front on the beach. Persian control of the sea meant that they had the time and the means to bring in material from elsewhere and construct earthworks, which would have hindered an assault by hoplites. On the main issue - why did both Persian flanks collapse under the Athenian charge - Sekunda offers not a wit of insight. Sekunda ends up telling the reader what he already knows - that the Greeks won - but he cannot explain why this occurred.

The only really strong point of this book is the order of battle data, which does a good job pointing out the relative strength, composition and disposition of each army. The three battle maps are decent, but given the very small area of the fighting and conflicting evidence, they really can't show much but general movements. In the end, Marathon is just one more of those historical events of which many of the pertinent facts have now been lost to posterity.

Average customer rating:
Marathon 490 BC: The First Persian Invasion of Greece (Praeger Illustrated Military History)
Nicholas Sekunda
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000ORL80A

Book Description

Girls have always excelled in subjects that are artistic or literary while boys have traditionally worked better with numbers, formulas and algorithms. Right? Wrong. Science was originally considered a "girl's subject" in the early nineteenth century, with a greater percentage of girls' schools offering equally sophisticated courses in physics, astronomy and chemistry than did comparable institutions for boys.
This insightful study provides a comparative analysis of the history of science education for adolescent boys and girls. Tracing the evolution of girls' scientific interests from the antebellum era through the twentieth century, it expands the understanding of the obstacles that emerged to change the dominant gender in science studies.

Customer Reviews:

A Must-Read Book.......2004-01-21

This well-written book offers primary source material that has radically altered this reviewer's thinking regarding women and science. Tolley demonstrates that science was indeed a "girls' subject," dispelling the common notion that it has always been exclusively within the male domain. The unexpected finding that proportionally more girls than boys studied science in early American academies is well substantiated. Thoroughly researched, this engaging volume concludes that, although the decline of science as a girls' subject in school was, in part, a result of discrimination, the decline of women's interest in science was also an unanticipated result of purposeful efforts to elevate the status of female education in the 19th century. Making use of vignettes, quantitative data, and illusrations, this richly written book traces the complex series of events that led to the domination of males in school science by the 20th century. A must-read for every scholar with interests in gender, issues of equity, history of education, and science education. Practitioners in science will also find this treatment of women and science education insightful. Summing up: Highly recommended. All university libraries; upper-division undergraduates and above. Copyright 2003 American Library Association

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