Valentine’s Day

It’s that sometimes-anticipated-by-couples-yet-often-dreaded-by-singles day of the year! In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, send an anonymous letter or bouquet of flowers to someone special to you-your mom, your recently-divorced best friend. This deliberate act of kindness will last long after the 14th as the memory lingers on.

PS: A really nice thing to do the night before Valentine’s Day is to offer to watch a friend or neighbor’s children so they can run errands or spend time with their significant other.

Shower the People You Love with Love

After a wedding or party, donate all the flowers to a nursing home or hospital. Alternately, take them to your place of work and fill the entire office with beauty and love.

Save Seeds

    My Aunt Ruth in Flat Rock, West Virginia raised me to save seeds. A child of the Great Depression, my aunt Ruth was teaching me the virtue of thrift when she showed me how to harvest, dry, and save seeds from veggies and flowers. Thrift was an important survival skill for that time and I see it as a forgotten virtue whose time has arrived once again. I remember being very impatient about how long it took for spring to come so I could sow the marigolds, alyssum, and four o’clocks that I had collected.

Shower the People You Love with Love

After a wedding or party, donate all the flowers to a nursing home or hospital. Alternately, take them to your place of work and fill the entire office with beauty and love.

Keep Your Garden Green

• Plant some bamboo. Bamboo contributes to the balancing of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
• Don’t use a leaf blower. The horrible noise is reason enough to avoid these machines. Compost instead, and never burn leaves!
• Plant a garden using xeriscaping-no water needed. Find out more at ecolife.com/garden/natural-lawn/xeriscaping.html.
• Capture rainwater for gardens.
• Fertilize with grass clippings.
• When watering your garden, turn on the water early in the morning to minimize evaporation.
• Try not to fertilize before a storm to avoid the fertilizer being washed away.

Plant Flowers in Abandoned Lots

    May Day was a sacred celebration of Spring in ancient times and remains a special day for common folk. I have attended several marvelous festivities complete with garlanded Maypoles; one held by Z Budapest is a treasured memory. I have my own tradition for this merry month, which is a really simple and easy way to celebrate spring: I plant flower seeds in neglected plots of land all around the Bay Area, particularly nasturtiums, which thrive on neglect and can bloom anywhere and under any circumstances. I could give a driving tour of San Francisco and the East Bay and show you the brightly colored patches that are the result of my Johnny Appleseed-style scattershot approach. You can even eat them! I always have a lot of nasturtiums growing in my garden and I collect the seeds once they have flowered in plastic baggies. I joke to my friends that I would like my legacy to be that I was "Fiesta Brenda," the name of a mix that yields a riot of color that can turn any former parking lot or weed patch into a pocket of red, yellow, and orange sunshine. I will add that some of my tenth-generation crop mutated into a lovely variegated leaf, which only adds to the glory. This bit of freeganomics feeds my should like almost nothing else. I would say it is a sensible act of beauty.

And don't Forget the Senseless Acts of Beauty!

    Ann Herbert, the poet artist who inspired Random Acts of Kindness, also implored us to add prettiness to the world. There are so many ways to do this: plant flower, pick up trash, or paint a lovely mural for the entire neighborhood's pleasure.

    What beauty can you bring to the world?

Save Seeds

    My Aunt Ruth in Flat Rock, West Virginia raised me to save seeds. A child of the Great Depression, my aunt Ruth was teaching me the virtue of thrift when she showed how to harvest, dry, and save seeds from veggies and flowers. Thrift was an important survival skill for that time and I see it as a forgotten virtue whose time has arrived once again. I remember being very impatient about how long it took for spring to come so I could sow the marigolds, alyssum, and four o'clocks that I had collected.