Love this map

(double click for full view)

The weather was beautiful today and I spent almost the whole day finishing off the end of fall clean-up in the garden. In front, I finished potting the two junipers I put in wooden barrels next to a big planter box stuffed with daffodils and hyacinths. I pulled out the sweet potato vines and put in tulips. In back I cut down the morning glory vine after collecting a bowl of seeds, and swept all the leaves and compost off the porch and stairs.

That's when I took this picture: the woodland tobacco flower (nicotiana) is still huge, fragrant and glorious, and some other flowers and perennials are enjoying this last breath of warm weather...

I finished working in the bed last weekend - I moved some of the perennial flowers - echinacea/coneflower, Japanese anemone, and toad lily - to sunnier spots, and put in a few more hostas.

In a related development, reports on the City of Paris' ambitious Velib bike-sharing program are mixed. "80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles [have been] stolen or damaged," which are worth, "when the system’s startup and maintenance expenses are included, $3,500 each."

I have to find a research study for a school assignment in which the investigators actively manipulated an independent variable. I was browsing for journal articles in the areas of crime and public safety, when I remembered this article from the Journal Science that I noticed with great interest around the time it was published: Testing The Broken Windows Theory