I’m foregoing Top Ten Tuesday til later in the week because I’ve got more pressing things to show you.
A few weeks ago, on a cold, wet, miserable day, I started to imagine what I could do with a little bit of land I have in the courtyard.
It’s a bare bit of land with conifers on one side, the peach tree at the back and a lovely flowering currant Ribes King Edward VII and a viburnum ‘Snowball‘. There are sometimes some nettles and some hollyhocks and in the winter, there were quite a few mushrooms. The outpipe for the bath runs underneath this plot, and at some point there was a tree here too – now just a stump. I’ve said before that the garden is a very functional thing here – we have a few no-maintenance or low-maintenance shrubs left by Madame A, but essentially, if it doesn’t produce something or need very little maintenance, it’s not got a place in the garden.
The space looked like this when we moved in:
Two years ago!What there was once…
And this is what it looked like a month ago – before Steve got giddy with the rotavator
I had a bit of a plan about what I wanted – a kind of spiral/keyhole shape that goes up higher in the middle.
A bit of a sketch
I’d started planting out what I wanted in the plot – a mixture of herbacious perennials and annuals – and I’d bought a couple that it was harder to find seeds for here in France, or that were part of our local pepinière’s 5 for 10€ deal. Not much has changed, except I’ve added a space for delphiniums and lupins.
So… what’s in it?
Pinterest board
campanula
calendula
zinnia
french marigolds
limonium
immortelles
marguerites
monarda
rudbeckia
coleopsis
dicentra bleeding heart
dahlia
aquilegia
And this is what it looks like now… of course, there’s a lot of growing still to do!
What it looks like now…
Now, I had a great idea. I like plant markers very much, on account of I often forget where things are and what they are. I decided I was going to make little rustic bunting-style flags with the name of the plant on it in permanent marker, tied with gardening twine.
Flags…
However, this is the source of consternation. Steve liked the bed idea and followed my instructions to the letter as to how to make it. He shifted all the grass and put down the weed suppressing carpet of newspaper, then the top soil. He liked the plant arrangement.
He doesn’t like the flags. Apparently, hate is too strong a word and he feels the same about these flags as he does about kidney beans. He laughed at the flags, though, and gave them a 2 out of 10. He said it made the garden look like Butlins.
I obviously DON’T think they make it look like Butlins. I think they are cool.
He also is taking far more of the credit than he should. He compared himself to Michelangelo and said that just because I came up with the idea doesn’t mean that I could execute it (I hasten to add, I did the actual picking, growing and planting and he moved some soil and put in the border) and he has laughed at my attempts.
This aside, I would like to thank him for his realisation of the foundation of my border.
Now all I have to do is get Noireau to realise it’s not a nice, plush outdoor toilet and convince a few people that the flags are a great, inspired idea!
A certain friend may find herself abandoned at the airport with her children when she turns up here for her summer trip unless she admits that they DON’T look like washing on a line and that people just don’t have knickers that look like this.
If you haven’t found Pinterest yet, you’re probably not missing out on very much unless you are the type of person who liked cutting things out and collecting them for later reference. If you like pretty things and magpie articles, it’s perfect for that.
Take me. I’m a compulsive cutter-outer. I blame my mother. She’s a cutter-outer too. She even cuts things out and posts them to me. Then I categorise them and stick them in a book. I keep recipes, ideas for the garden, ideas for the home, pictures I like… just like I used to keep pictures of Morten Harket from A-Ha when I was twelve. I keep them to read when I need them.
Cutting-out compulsion!
This isn’t so easy on the internet.
Back in the early days, about fifteen years ago, I used to print things off. This is not good for many reasons. One is that it uses up a lot of ink. The second is that it uses a lot of paper.
Then bookmarks came along.
I book marked. I reddit. I found other online ‘cut-and-keep’ methods and I kept them.
Book marks, however, are just a link. They don’t always tell you about content, unless you tell it to. They aren’t pretty. They are just functional. Not only that, my book mark bar was getting out of hand. Even with Diigo, which has a wonderful facility where you can add tags, I very rarely go back and look at stuff again. It gets forgotten about. I’ve got hundreds of things on Diigo and I never look at them again, unless I’ve book marked things for a lesson and I look at it once.
Bookmarks also need looking at regularly and you spend an inordinate amount of time looking over sites that may have added loads of new content or none at all.
That’s where RSS reader comes in. Add an RSS reader to your browser, click on it to ‘subscribe’ to a blog and then it cuts them out and puts them on a feedreader. It’s brilliant. I follow about 200 sites and it tells me every time I click on it what’s new or been updated. I can subscribe to gardening pages and get their new articles. I don’t have to keep looking back at a blog that hasn’t been updated.
An RSS button... click to subscribe (and click to find the article this came from telling you how to use RSS if you haven't already)
RSS is only good if you want everything on that site, however. I then have a choice. I’ve read something interesting, but didn’t really want the rest of the blog/site. What do I do?
I can RSS it, but then I get stuff I don’t want to read, which is annoying. I can bookmark it or Diigo it and never revisit it.
As you can see, I link to articles I’ve read about the plants I’ve sown. They give me advice, reminders, prompts. Sometimes, it’s from the exact seed company. Sometimes, it’s just a track of what I’ve read and what’s in my garden. It’s a one-stop at-a-glance place where every time I want to see what advice I need for growing my lettuce, I can just click on the picture and it will take me there.
It’s a great digital version of something I’ve done for donkeys.
Of course, some people think – and the law is included in this maybe – that I’m ‘stealing’ the image.
They say that I’ve not credited the owner (Pinterest does… it’s easy to link and hard to get rid of the link to the original site – therefore, it’s very easy to get back to the source… even if it gets ‘repinned’)
Sometimes, they say that the owner wouldn’t give permission for me to ‘use’ the image.
That’s true. I have not asked a single one of any of the image-owners for their permission.
However, when I pin an image, it tells the website that a ping-back has been created. This tells the owner that a link has been made. You can click on it and see it. I can see who’s pinned my stuff and who’s repinned it. I can even comment on their pins. Two people have done this on mine. I’d pinned a great artist, Belinda Fireman, and she commented on my pin. Not only that, she knows how great I thought her work was. I pinned something from a Spanish Etsy designer and she’d said thanks too. People have pinned my stuff from Flickr. It’s amazing to see people spread and share your work.
Of course, recognition is nice too. Sometimes, something is pinned beyond all recognition, or people don’t click to see the original site.
Once, when I was a teacher-adviser, I came up with an oral activity on Macbeth. It was based on Paul Ginnis’s work. I credited him in the article. I delivered the activity and wrote my findings up. I took photos. I sourced and credited appropriately. It went as an article in the Secondary English Magazine.
Two months later, I was at a paid-for conference where someone delivered this as ‘their own.’ They didn’t credit Paul Ginnis. They didn’t credit me. They even had copied my photographs from the article, uploaded them, put them in a powerpoint and delivered it to 20 people paying £100 for the conference. Including one angry owner. Me.
After the conference, I approached the thief. I asked him where he’d got his inspiration. To his credit, he admitted it wasn’t his. Then I told him it was my work. He didn’t even blush. I was mad. Hardened copyright abuser meets his source. Hardened copyright abuser has just made £2,000 from theft.
But I was gracious. I said I was very flattered, but would he please credit a) Paul Ginnis and b) the children who’d produced the work (the name of the school was clear on the photos anyway…)
Probably, he was sussed as being a fraud. Maybe not. Maybe he’s written books filled with ‘stolen’ ideas.
Recently, one of my little students said he was going to perform one of his GCSE pieces in class. It was based on ‘Room 101’ – the BBC comedy series. Now, way back in 2006, when I was a speaking and listening assessor for an exam board, I got so tired of what ‘speeches’ most schools did that I had a hissy fit. Most were doing ‘do a speech about your work experience’, or ‘do a speech about a hobby. ‘ This is fine if you don’t mind 30 accounts over about 3 hours of making tea, or – worse – 30 accounts over about 30 hours about teenagers’ hobbies. Until you have someone bring skinned rabbits into school, or a selection of shotguns, fishing rods or cheap make-up from the market and talk about it until you and the other 29 non-interested teenagers in the room all have bleeding ears, then you won’t really know why I had that hissy fit. Having spent 5 days – 25 hours – listening to boys talking about their fishing rods – then I went home and thought about speeches that would spark everybody’s interest. Room 101 was one. Make an argument about a thing you’d want to ban. Another was ‘It’s so unfair!’ largely inspired by John Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf. Ironically, I was not the only one inspired by a retelling of a villain’s story. Wicked seems to have gone a long way on it.
Anyway, said student told me of his assignment. I was a little flattered, though not big-headed enough to think that it was definitely MY idea (which it isn’t, since it was taken from the BBC series, and them from 1984 and Orwell probably yoinked it from somewhere or other) as such memes seem to have a life of their own, spontaneously flowering in many open minds globally. However, I did not get my knickers in a twist and try to trace down the teacher’s source and demand a credit. I just had a little moment when I thought ‘wow!’
Honestly, I thought it was pretty cool an idea had travelled and I was pleased my student was inspired. He got an A. I was suitably pleased.
The upshot of all of this is that you can try to copyright things, trademark them and so on, but ultimately, people will take your ideas and not give you credit. Nice people will. They’ll say thank you and appreciate you. Unscrupulous people will take your stuff anyway. They’ll use screen capture to steal your images or words, if you use a programme to stop them copying.
Personally, people who are precious about their own ideas are those who like to think they are inspired in a bubble and that all of their ideas are self-creating and spontaneous and original. I’ve unsubscribed from three blogs who find it offensive that I pin things and say they don’t want their own things pinning. So you want to use the internet to share your ‘original’ ideas (one was a painter whose work owed a lot to lots of other painters, and one was an embroidery blog I follow, who often links to stitches from other people and I think it’s a bit rich to say ‘Oh, I like this sharing, but not that sharing and I want YOU to share how I inspire you, but I don’t want you to keep hold of anything that I’ve done that inspires you…) but you don’t want to share what I do.
Why have a blog of your stuff if you a) don’t want people to look and b) don’t want people to be inspired by you or c) don’t want people to share your stuff with others who might also like it?
I’ve visited 10 sites today that I wouldn’t normally have visited because of Pinterest. I get Pinterest traffic myself. Pinterest shot one blog’s stats through the roof. And that’s all good.
I think, as a writer, artist, whatever, if I personally put something on the internet, I can’t then say ‘but don’t share it’. Pinterest doesn’t encourage stealing because it links back automatically to the original source, so the owner gets a credit. Tumblr does the same.
So those people who bang on about copyright infringement and theft – well, they maybe would be better to keep their ideas to themselves – and then they’re never, ever going to be stolen.
So, if you see something on my site you want to pin, go for it! I’d be honoured. If you want to share it – lovely! If you think it’s worth sharing, I’m truly touched. If it ends up ten months later splattered all over Pinterest, completely uncredited, well, I’LL know, and that’s the important thing. I can tell myself ‘that’s me!’ and smile at the effect.
And for those getting ants in their pants about it, by my count from my FB friends, 4 out of 300 use it. That’s less than 1% of the internet population. All are women. All are about my age. All are crafty. All pin because they want to link back to the original site easily. None are thieves. Is it really worth getting all agitated about?!
That’s my almost-two-thousand-penneth.
No. It’s almost my almost-two-thousand-penneth.
I told you last time about my business cards… here they are:
Prime example of copyrightness… I think I came up with ‘for all your wordy needs’ spontaneously. Steve thinks HE came up with it. I KNOW he didn’t. But when I googled it, 748 other people thought the same thing. I’m DAMN sure the idea came from NONE of them. But whoever DID think of it first might be pretty annoyed I’m flaunting it on the internet. Hopefully, they feel like I do about the Room 101 lesson: it’s nice to be honoured, even if people don’t know they’re doing it. And if it’s a kind-of-spontaneous-great-minds-think-alike thing, well, I think human beings are amazing and sometimes scarily hive-like. But that’s still pretty cool all the same.
As the winter settles in and I get all nesty, I dream of DIY projects. I’ve started making a wreath for Christmas (watch this space), the Christmas cards are done, I’ve got the sewing machine out and I’m awash in red and yellow satin, sequins and silver ribbon to make Christmas decorations.
I start dreaming of beautiful interiors. Instead of the Home and Gardens and BBC Good Homes, I now dream of interiors of the more Country Homes type – all resaved, reused, repurposed, upscaled objets trouvés. And this is where I’m putting all my love:
Lady Justine's Blog 