AT THE LIBRARY

For one thing, April happens to be "National Landscape Architecture Month", and the birthday of the man widely regarded as the profession’s founder, Frederick Law Olmsted, is celebrated on the 26^th. In 1874 Congress commissioned him to create a landscape plan for the grounds of the Capitol. But Olmstead may be best known for his last and largest project, the laying out of the 120,000-acre Biltmore Estate of George Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina. For an armchair tour of the building and grounds, check out John Morrill Bryan’s book Biltmore Estate : the Most Distinguished Private Place.

There’s enough going on in the world these days to discomfit anybody who’s paying attention. "Stress Awareness Month" reminds us to consider the very real dangers of stress, to look for helpful strategies for coping, and to shun myths about stress that are prevalent in our society. Some resources that might be useful are the following: Health Solutions : Stress Relief and Stress: Portrait of a Killer, both DVDs, along with the books In Control by Redford B. Williams, The Book for People Who Do Too Much by Bradley Trevor Greive, and Stress Less by Don Colvert. Elizabethan lawyer, philosopher, and scientist Sir Francis Bacon said, "Knowledge is power", and when it comes to the subtle assassin called stress, adequate knowledge might come to mean a whole lot more.

"World Habitat Awareness Month" is observed in April, a time to think about the need to protect the habitat of all of Earth’s creatures and to make a conscious effort to preserve nature’s ecosystems. On March 31, the President signed into law a bill to protect as wilderness more than 2 million acres, spread across nine states, and a thousand miles of rivers, a big step toward preserving a healthy and beautiful natural environment for all the living to benefit from and enjoy, even if from a distance. To get an idea of how special and remarkable this small, blue planet really is, it would be good to spend time looking at the amazing views in Planet Earth As You’ve Never Seen It Before by Alastair Fothergill and others. It puts our lives here in a new perspective.

Finally, April is "National Poetry Month", a time to pay tribute to the great legacy and ongoing achievement of America’s poets and to the vital role poetry plays in the life of a people. To meet some of the nation’s contemporary poets, try the work of Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, especially Delights & Shadows (winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry), as well as The Niagara River by the current Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. Poetry can be challenging and it doesn’t often give up its treasures with one reading. Rather, it is thought one has to be willing to spend time with, a voice to be carefully listened to. The American poet William Carlos Williams so beautifully put it this way: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."