you should see my corgis at sunset in the snow

Tasha Tudor's gardens, slug life, and Robby Hoffman

Jun 06, 2025

My humble herb garden. I have lead in my soil. I do not yet have a patio where I can display my nice collection of terracotta pots, so for now, they sit on the ground. Tasha Tudor would not like that barcode sticker.

Greetings, earthlings!

Here are three things I’m thinking about this week.

1. Tasha Tudor’s Garden

These days, when people ask me what’s new or how I’m doing, I often respond with some version of, “I’m great–life is feeling really small.” 98% of my time is spent on a couple blocks: my crossing guard intersection is a stone’s throw from my house, my partner lives just beyond the intersection, and I work from my home-based studio looking out over my backyard, where I spend most of my mornings and evenings digging, planting, trellising, pruning, dreaming. Most of my life is happening in the span of two blocks, and I’m loving it.

Tasha Tudor’s Garden seems to have magically appeared in my stack of coffee table books. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s become my favorite book to leaf through in the mornings with my coffee. Tasha Tudor was a watercolor artist and children’s book author who lived in Southern Vermont and kept up her glorious homestead and extensive, gorgeous, drool-worthy gardens while wearing a bonnet and apron.

I’m entering my Tasha Tudor era.

Since I can’t share the full contents of the book and all its photographs of Tasha's heirloom tulips, 10-foot-tall Hollyhocks, birch bark trellises, and fields of peonies, I went to YouTube and found a series of ASMR-y videos made and narrated by Japanese filmmakers showing off her gardens. Enjoy:

Okay, so in my struggle to come up with a title for this newsletter, I looked up “Tasha Tudor quotes,” and found this one that I can’t not share with you:

“You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow. It's their finest hour. About five o'clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages.”
― Tasha Tudor, The Private World of Tasha Tudor

2. Year of the Slug

I already shared this album a couple of months back, but I’m catching Caroline Rose on Slug Tour next week in Minneapolis, so I’ll plug their album again because I love it so so much and it’s on the mind:

3. Robby Hoffman on WTF with Marc Maron

It’s strange to have just gotten into WTF with Marc Maron over the past month or so, and then for him to announce that he’s ending his podcast after 16(!) years. I just got here, man!

My favorite episode so far was his interview with Robby Hoffman, who’s popping up in so many things I’ve watched recently and makes me laugh so so hard. She’s had roles in Dying for Sex, Hacks, and carried an episode of the delightfully strange but sometimes hard-to-watch Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.

I made this illustration for Local Motion, our local walk/bike advocacy organization (and where I had my first “real” job–if wrenching on bikes in a basement is a real job):