A Garden In Thyme

05/21/2026

Look who is ready for Memorial Day ❤️
Washington Crossing Historic Park Hibbs House Kitchen Garden

05/19/2026

Thompson-Neely Kitchen Garden

05/13/2026

New website launch! Please check out the new offerings, share, and like 🤗

04/12/2026

The Belle House Airbnb all ready for Spring and another 5 ⭐️ year!

04/09/2026

03/21/2026

Very cool, consider this!

02/24/2026

Polling the Willow, Osier Cutting and Peeling — rural work for men and women
H. R. Robertson (1875). The industrial uses of the willow, including its close relatives, the sallow and osier, were described in detail by the venerable John Evelyn. He noted that “all kinds of basket-work,” for which even early Britons were admired in ancient Rome, were made from willow.

The wood, he wrote, was used for pill-boxes, cart saddle-trees, gun-stocks, and half-pikes; for harrows, shoemakers’ lasts, heels, and clogs; and for forks, rake teeth, perches, rafters, ladders, hop poles, and bean stakes.

It also served to make hurdles, sieves, lattices, platters, small casks, pales, baskets, trays, trenchers, and boards for sharpening table knives. Evelyn even mentioned its use by painters for “scriblets”, which may have referred to charcoal used for sketching, still best made from willow wood today.

Willow has long been prized wherever water meets work. It has been used for the floats of paddle-steamers and the shrouds of water-wheels, and was once the preferred material for gunpowder charcoal until supplies became scarce.

Beyond industry, the willow provides many natural benefits: it stabilises riverbanks, offers nectar for bees, yields clean-burning firewood, drains marshy soils, and feeds cattle with its leaves. Its bark, containing salicin, supplies a remedy for fever and ague, ailments common in the damp regions where willows thrive.

Both the bark and leaves are astringent, and the bark of many species can be used for tanning leather. In Norway and Russia, tanners have long preferred willow to oak, a practice said to contribute to the distinctive quality of Russian leather.

02/20/2026

The highly talented Keith Mountford Watercolor Artist depicting my humble little landscape artistry and this beautiful historic Hibbs House at Washington Crossing Historic Park! Thank you Keith for sharing beauth with the world

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/187QXAVcQZ/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Just completed today.