Two years of blogging

How quickly the time flies…today makes two years since I started this blog! Along the way a lot of things have been changed, in the garden, in the blog, in the world.

In my immediate world, the garden has expanded, with more interesting new plants (and some interesting old ones); the house has changed colour (but that white door still isn't yellow, a first-thing-in-spring project); some plants have gone to sleep, and some have yet to arrive here, like the Mimulus cardinalis in the photo just below. Lots of new books have come to live in my library, and while I'm personally working on another book, we're not there yet. We've developed the garden to be even more pollinator friendly, including plenty of native plants and a monarch butterfly waystation area.


Here’s what I wrote in that first post:

Words are a lot like seeds from flowers, grasses or trees. They get cast out onto the winds, or in this case, the Web, and we never know where they will end up or how they will fare. Some may tumble onto fallow ground, in which case they fail to germinate. Others land on fertile, prepared land, where they may flourish and bloom. Of course, not every word or every seed planted will prove to be a stunning rose. Some may be weeds. But that's one of the reasons that I connect gardening to writing, and writing to gardening. Both are facets of who I am, not something I just do. And while not every sentence I write is a rose of perfection, hopefully there aren't too many weeds.

There are about 220 posts here and in the archives since Jan 2006; I’ve removed probably 40 others, some because they were really stale-dated, some because I wanted to use parts of them in articles. I haven’t kept a stat-counter that whole time, but I can tell you that since mid-April of 2007, there have been some 42,000 visitors to bloomingwriter. Those include return as well as one-time visitors, and they come from all over the world, although especially from: Canada, the US, and Australia, with some regular visitors coming from Scotland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland.

Just as the readership here has increased, my readership of other blogs has radically increased; and this has been a great delight to me, because I’ve learned so much from each one of my fellow gardening blogs. In fact, my gardening hat is off to each of you who also blogs; from you I’ve learned so many new things about plants, about gardening, about parts of the world that I may never get to visit, and in some cases I didn’t even know existed (hello, Blithewold!)

This is not something I make any money off, and it may puzzle some people why I’d do a freebie when I make a living as a writer. (Maybe one day I’ll make enough from Google adsense to, oh, I dunno…buy a new plant!? I’m not holding my breath on that.) A lot of my professional work is about gardening, although I do deal with other topics of interest too. I love gardening in all its many facets, and one of those facets is the people I get to meet, either by email or in person; gardeners, nursery operators, landscapers, fellow writers including my fellow bloggers. Because I learn so much from others, I figure that writing the blog, and the email newsletter that I do for people mostly in Atlantic Canada, is a way of giving back to the gardening community at large. It’s just good gardening karma; a way of sharing seeds of information the way we share plants and seeds. And it’s fun, just like grubbing in the dirt is.

Or hanging out with the catchildren. Happily, ours haven’t learned to use the computer. Not yet, anyway, for anything but sleeping on. That’s not to say Mungus isn’t plotting…