Four years of bloomingwriter's bloomin' rantings

I love flowers, and I love fireworks. Because I'm on deadline, I couldn't spend a lot of time making up some photos to go along with this little post, so I made a popart work out of one of my favourite foliar fireworks, Astrantia. Why fireworks, you ask? It's a celebration. After all, it's not every day that a blog turns 4 years old. In spite of its sometimes frazzled owner, even.

Back in late November and early December, I was musing whether or not to continue blogging, for a whole bunch of reasons. But then I remembered why I started bloomingwriter back in the beginning—as a way of giving back to the gardening community around me, near and far—and how many blessings of friends and wisdom and fun have come to me across the miles.

Unlike some, I haven’t picked up any jobs/clients from doing this, but that wasn’t my intent. I work fulltime as a freelancer, and while it’s sometimes erratic in terms of projects and timely pay, a stint last year in a so called ‘real’ job convinced me that I’m meant to continue on as a freelancer.

Here’s part of what I wrote in my first post, four years ago today:

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.

The blogosphere, and indeed my own gardening and writing world, have changed dramatically since January of 2006. I was on dialup back then, and it wasn’t until a year or so later that a local company invested in our small community and ran in highspeed internet: not only highspeed, but wireless highspeed. Whoo hoo! It took another year or so to get some glitches worked out, and the company further invested in new equipment to make things work brilliantly. Suddenly, I could post more photos, read more blogs, explore and increase my gardening knowledge dramatically. So thanks, Steve and the gang at Cross Country Television. You’re made of awesome.

Over this week I’ll be putting up a couple of posts from the past, and also I want to float a discussion with readers about encouraging others in this garden-blogging community. That’s a talk for another day, however. For now, I just want to give huge bouquets of thanks to all of you who take the time to read, to comment, to link back, to otherwise be supportive of a fellow blogger. You’re also all made of awesome. Bouquets of lavender to y'all.



Post written by jodi (bloomingwriter)