Tantri Wija

3 weeks ago | seattletimes.com | Tantri Wija

SWANSONS NURSERY BEGAN with a love story. And appropriately for a romance, it was a tale fragrant with the perfume of thousands of flowers. The stalwart swain of our story is Swansons founder August Swanson, who originally immigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota, from Sweden, paying for his passage with the proceeds from a pamphlet he authored about horticulture. In Minnesota, he opened an evocatively named greenhouse operation called “Swanson’s Land of Flowers” in 1888.

1 month ago | seattletimes.com | Tantri Wija

IMAGINE THE Pacific Northwest of your dreams. Forget the traffic and the high rent and the tech gray goo and float away in a vision of mountains covered in spiny evergreens through which a Sasquatch peeks up at a bright yellow seaplane soaring across the clear blue sky from one island to another. And in real life, there’s a good chance that plane belongs to Kenmore Air.

1 month ago | seattletimes.com | Tantri Wija

“Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. TolkienAND NOT ALL those who are lost wander. Some just walk in circles and give up from weariness, some sit down and wait for rescue, and some — perhaps because they went to summer camp and learned a thing or two about wayfinding — can ramble their way back to the path using the age-old tools of compass and map.

2 months ago | seattletimes.com | Tantri Wija

PEOPLE IN SEATTLE love their gear. This is the ancestral home of REI, after all, and Filson, and a certain Patagonia jacket is almost a uniform in some parts of town. But while the local aesthetic and the local elements call for waterproof boots, layered flannel, beanie hats and hardy wool socks, not everyone can (or wants to) pay a premium for the kind of famously expensive prosumer premium kit that stocks the shelves of many of those stores.

2 months ago | seattletimes.com | Tantri Wija

BOWLING, LIKE SO MANY of life’s pleasures (including beer, paper and pyramids), supposedly was invented by the ancient Egyptians. Through the ages, people have continued to joyfully roll balls to knock over standing pinlike objects, though bowling as we know it probably originates from lawn bowling games played in medieval England, and counts among its devotees Henry the VIII.