A little housekeeping on this lovely spring morning, cher public. Starting today, commenters will be required to log in to the site. Most of you are already signed up and logged in as it is, so this new condition will mostly apply to new visitors to parterre.com. The login will be helpful to La Cieca in keeping spam out of the comments and in filtering out the rare hit-and-run insult that shows up from time to time here.

La Cieca thanks you for your patience and your understanding, and asks you to remember that she doesn’t hate you, she hates the dirt.