Headline yesterday: Tanning Beds are as Bad as Arsenic. Headline in my garden today: Natural Sun Not Always a Boon to Plants.

Every gardening book tells its reader about light changes in the garden. Remove a tree from a shade garden and you have a sunny garden. We removed two box elder trees last summer, which turned a little wild garden of mine into something more like "little garden on the prairie". This big-leaf hosta, so fibrous and hardy, has tried valiantly to look into the sun without benefit of sunglasses, but it is now clear that the result is something akin to its living in a tanning bed. Like all of us who like to run away from our problems, this one went on a trip to a new and shadier garden where it will suffer through this unsightly phase until frost intervenes. Next spring all blemishes will be forgotten. Headline, May, 2010: Travel--It's Not Just for People Anymore.