Garden Variety is taking a day off today.

Nancy, my best friend since the seventh grade, is in town with her husband, and I think we will do some touristy stuff.

Nancy and Connie and I have been best friends since junior high, which is what we used to call middle school.

After the three of us finished the heavy lifting of raising young children, we began to plan weekend getaways for just the three of us every year or so. One of us would do the planning and the other two would simply make plane reservations.

One of our trips was to New Orleans, where we stayed in a funky B&B and toured the Garden District of the city. This was, of course, before Katrina.

For another weekend, we went to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland - in the cool and quiet late fall - and walked in the woods and talked for hours.

We have visited New York City. St. Michaels, MD, upstate New York and Bucks County Pa. All three of us did not make it every time. But whenever two of us are together, the other is there as well.

One of our most memorable trips was arranged by Nancy to Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington State, where she and her family now live.

We stayed in a cottage that was more like a doll's house and visited the shops and restaurants on the tiny island.

I am telling this story because my vivid memory of that trip is of the flowers.

The cool, moist weather on that tiny island produced the most beautiful and abundant window boxes, containers and tiny front-yard gardens.

The colors, perhaps enhanced by the droplets of water in the air, were almost unreal.

Nancy will only visit for a little more than a day. She and her husband drove across country to bring furniture to their daughter in Baltimore. They have other friends and other stops, and then they must head back to the left coast.

The pressure is on me to make Nancy's brief time here memorable.

There are plenty of museums and monuments and art galleries in Annapolis, Baltimore and Washington.

But I will try to find some flowers for her, too.

"The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants" is actually the best of three other books: "Pollen," "Seeds" and "Fruit."

All of them are pictorial wonders that use the best of science, art and technology to depict the anatomy of plants and their proficient reproduction.

This lush and otherworldly picture book ($29.95, Firefly Books) illustrates in the smallest detail the inscrutable work of plants making more plants, and fruits making more fruit, flowers making more flowers.

Robert Kesseler using an electron microscope produced the images. Wolfgang Stuppy and Madeline Harley of London’s Royal Botanic Gardens write the accompanying text with wit and erudition.

This is truly a look into the secret life of plants.

(And I will send this luscious book to a lucky someone randomly selected from among the commenters to this post. Be sure to include your e-mail. I won't share it, but I will need it to contact the winner.)

Photo credit: Associated Press 

At the White House, the groundskeeper is also the dog sitter.

Dale Haney, who has been at the White House for 40 years, has been walking every presidential pooch since King Timahoe of the Nixon administration.

Now he is in charge of Bo, the Obama's Portuguese water dog, when the family isn't around. (By family, we mean Mrs. Obama, who, like mothers everywhere, ended up with most of the dog duties.)

Haney is in charge of all the White House grounds - 18 1/2 acres - a job that is pretty much 365 days a year. Mowing the North and South lawns alone takes eight hours, he reports.

He oversees a staff of 20 and reports to work every day at 6 a.m.

Just as most presidents have done, Barack Obama planted a tree - a Littleleaf Linden - to commemorate their time in the White House. But the vegetable garden, planted by the First Lady, is a new experience for Haney.

And Bo?

He seems to be the reason that the Obamas are so interested in Haney's work on the grounds.

"They know what's going on because they're always out here walking the dog," he said.