I'll be posting a new batch of garden blogs later today tomorrow. For now...

Free at last: Jill Carroll update page at the Christian Science Monitor, for which she was reporting when she was abducted in Baghdad Jan. 7, now has statements from her family and the Christian Science board. Expect to see more there as the story of her release develops. For now, the Washington Post seems to have good details: Journalist Jill Carroll Released in Iraq.

9:55 a.m.
Lost Album Series :: Dylan - Cash sessions. Aquarium Drunkard via Robot Wisdom.

Concrete: Eric Lilius, my longtime "Canadian correspondent," fell silent for a while, but he's back with two new recommendations. One spins off an obit:

Ian Hamilton Finlay
October 28, 1925 - March 27, 2006
Scottish poet and artist who turned his Lanarkshire grounds into Little Sparta, a celebrated shrine to pacifism

Surprisingly for a poet, perhaps, Ian Hamilton Finlay most striking, best-known and internationally celebrated creation was a garden.

Over many years he gradually turned the grounds about his Lanarkshire home into a unique assemblage of sculptures, structures and inscribed stones called Little Sparta. The ideas given concrete form in Little Sparta range widely over philosophy and myth, but the over-arching idea was Finlay抯 uncompromising hostility to war, in all its forms from Homer onwards.

Also surprisingly for one whose life and art were devoted to the pacifist cause, usually expressed in terms of a rather chilly Neo-Classicism, Finlay was famously prone to confrontation -- with everyone from his local council in Scotland and the various British Arts Councils to the French Government itself.

His running battles with Strathclyde Regional Council over whether he should pay commercial rates on a ruined cow byre in his grounds, converted into what the council claimed was a commercial gallery while in his eyes it was a garden temple, made news in a way that hardly any art exhibition could ever hope to.

He had already had a well-publicised brush with the but-is-it-art controversy: in 1976 he was unwittingly drawn into the hullabaloo surrounding Carl Andre’s bricks, when shortly afterwards the Tate bought a wooden board by Finlay, painted with the words “Starlit Waters”, for “£500 of taxpayers’ money”.

He also designed Stockwood Park and Bell's Cherrybank Gardens

Finlay's printed works.

Also from Eric: Amazing free-form juggling video. It's good to get gifts from Eagle Lake, Ontario, again.