Three years of Blogging Madness

I wish I could draw cartoons. I'd love to be able to draw a cartoon of a writer, slaving over a laptop while music blasts around her, plants lean over her shoulder, and a cat or two spellechecks what she's doing. Because that would be the perfect way to celebrate THREE YEARS of blogging on Bloomingwriter. Three years and about 345 posts over the course of those years; the numbers were down somewhat last year from 2007 (which saw over 160, about one every other day), but certainly up from the first year when I did about one a week. (You can tell when highspeed got here!) It occurred to me earlier this afternoon that it must be getting close to the blogaversary, and a quick check confirmed that yes, three years ago today was my beginning with this adventure.

Here's a bit from the first entry I ever made on Bloomingwriter:

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.

In the past three year's I've come to 'meet' many people around the blogosphere, and share some good laughs and experiences. We've commiserated over weather bombs, wet springs, cranky seedlings, too many weeds; we've rejoiced over the first tomato and each month's blooms, wrote poetry and book reviews and festooned our blogs with awards and photos and links and all kinds of other bits of hilarity and wisdom. Some have fallen by the wayside, or had real life interfere with their blogging. New blogs have sprung up like seedlings. There's a huge wealth of gardening wisdom and whimsy out there and I'm delighted to be a part of it all. And delighted to have made the acquaintance of so many of you. Here's to many more years of blogging fun for all of us!

Garden Blogger's Geography Project: Wrapup Pt 2!

Nothing like supper and a nap to renew one's energy, is there? If we had a prize for "most entertainingly original" post, I think it would have to go to Ottawa Hortiphilia for the highly amusing poem at the beginning of OH's post about our nation's capital city. It's a lovely city, if somewhat challenging for gardeners. Our friend Kylie writes movingly about her part of Ohio on a regular basis, but it's always a treat to read anything she posts from her little acre. Gloria writes about Chicago and the waters that define her fair city over at Pollinators-welcome, her wildlife-friendly blog plot, while thanks to Beckie I learned that Royal, Illinois, got its name from a sign on a railcar advertising baking powder.

The award for blogger-living-closest-to-bloomingwriter would be Nancy at Soliloquey, living 45 minutes from here in the next county, while Shady Gardener in Iowa has the best blog title I've come across yet: "Does everything grow better in my neighbor's Yard?" Gisela at Guildwood, near Toronto, showed us another side of Toronto that is far superior to what the tourist brochures and city hype provide. And the two sisters, Apple and Countrygirl, who garden at the end of Lake Ontario in upstate New York, entice us with castles and parks and friends' gardens to visit.

Historiana has taught me a lot about her plot in Kentucky with her musings, and she currently has a wonderful photo of a daffodil on her sidebar with the exhortation to "Think Spring, People!" Amen, fellow gardener! I bet it's fun doing Veg Plotting in Chippenham with two such affable looking felines as Jess and Skimble to help out. Jim, who gardens in Buffalo, New York, gets the gotcha-award for having Spunky Boomerang get up and bump the monitor: I usually have my volume shut off when writing, so didn't know about the bird songs on his front page. There are a lot of New York state gardeners participating in our meme, as Kerri lives in upstate New York in a region with the delightful name of Central Leatherstocking! The trolls under bridges had better watch out for those Weed Whacking Wenches out in Seattle--they sound like my kinda gardeners, for sure.

Are we there yet? Nope. Bathroom break, and then we're back!

Kris wrote a lovely and moving love story about Rhode Island's Blithewold, a beautiful garden I hope to visit in the not too far future. Another place I hope to see soon is the only province in Canada I've not been to: Saskatchewan, home of Larry's Sherwood Greenhouses but also of bloggin' bud Kate, both in Regina. Rather different from not-so-flat Nova Scotia, but beautiful nonetheless. We had a Bliss-ful experience visiting Yolanda and the Bliss Team's home in Dinteloord, Netherlands, returning to North America to bask in the warmth of another of the Austin Bloggers, Annie at The Transplantable Rose. Since we were sunning ourselves anyway, it was a quick trip down to the Tampa area of Florida to visit Meems at Hoe and Shovel, then skipped back over to Texas to visit Brenda in the Piney Woods of Tyler, in the Lone Star state. Needing a little drier heat, we skipped over to Phoenix in Arizona for a visit with Garden Djinn, where I learned that monsoons in the Sonoran dessert are called haboobs. We're having a Fundy Haboob here tonight, with a drownpour of mild, spring-scented rain, for what it's worth. From there, we headed back north a bit, to central Indiana and Robin's Nesting Place, where we got to enjoy both her fun writing and some utterly exquisite photography.

One of the joyous things about these meme has been getting to meet new-to-me bloggers, including the erudite and definitely amusing Benjamin Vogt of the Deep Middle, in Nebraska. Deciding it was time to skip across the ocean again, we sailed over to Giekau in Germany for a visit with Corinna at her Paradise Found, then caught the red-eye to Melbourne Australia for a visit at From Little Things, where I got sidetracked by the Italian lavender farm.

I could have stayed there permanently, but the cats needed feeding so it was back across the pond and touchdown at Garden Fool's plot near New York City. Since we were in the neighbourhood, so to speak, we skipped over to Lissa's home in Saratoga Springs and took a horse for a gallop down a track. (I did this once, with a retired racehorse while I was a student at Ag College, because the track was right next door to the barn...whoo hooo!) Entangled claims to be geographically challenged, but I'm link challenged, obviously, because I read the post, commented on it....and lost the link somewhere until today. And last but never least, we have a highly entertaining post from Sue Swift, in Milan, Italy, who's longing to be elsewhere.

Well...we've logged a lot of e-air-miles over the past month, and judging by your comments, had a lot of fun learning about our gardening neighbours near and far. I realized it wasn't going to be easy to pick a favourite post, as they're all my favourites...so I just cut up some pieces of paper, wrote each blogger's name on one, and put them all in my gardening hat. The random winner of a copy of The Atlantic Gardener's Greenbook is Frances at Faire Garden. Congratulations, Frances!

If I were independently wealthy, I'd send a copy of my book to each of you. Unfortunately, I can't quite go that far, so I've created a special badge/award for each of you who participated. Now you can all claim to have your very own Meconopsis, or blue poppy! A little story about this: this image is on my business cards, and was created by my uncle Don, a commercial artist in Virginia. So I have utterly unique business cards, and you now share something with a gardener and writer in Nova Scotia, wherever you are. Just right click to save it to your desktop and post on your blog with my admiration for your hard work. (is this better than an "A", Kylee?)

(Edit in the morning: I've made a smaller version, which I was having trouble with last night. Try this is that one is too big for you!)

Again, congratulations and my heartfelt thanks to all of you, and here's hoping we soon see spring wherever we garden. (Except of course for you in the southern Hemisphere, who are waiting for autumn!)

Garden Blogger's Geography Project: The Wrap-Up Post, Pt 1.

One thing I've learned since we initiated this blog project is that my weather trails a day or two behind some of my US gardening friends. The ice storm you received in the past couple of days is lashing us right now, although the gale-force winds are keeping ice formation down somewhat. Yesterday we enjoyed the mild spell you had several days ago, so I anxiously await reports of fairer weather from Kylee, Layanee, Sandy, Robin, et al.

According to my calculations, there have been 60 garden bloggers take part in the Geography Project, from right across the world. We've had posts from New York and the Netherlands, from the chill reaches of Saskatchewan to the balmy south of Florida, Texas and California; from Sweden to Ontario, Poland to South Africa, and from winter-weary Chicago to the summer-enjoying Australians and South Africans. My gardenin' hat is off to each and every one of you.

I'm going to keep the list of posts along the left column for a while, until such time as I figure out a way to give it a separate page (which may mean moving to another blogging host, ouch. Not this week, not while rebuilding a monthly project I've done for more than ten years in QuarkXpress and now have to move to InDesign. ) And if you haven't checked out some of them, I urge you to do so. Some are hilariously funny (like the always amusing John, aka Wiseacre, and our almost late Sue in Italy. Each one of them teaches us something new about the world we live in--and in many cases, causes us to look at our own part of the world with new eyes. As Annie in Austin commented in the last post,

Jodi, at first your project seemed like another fun garden blogger meme - especially when so many of you were trapped in winter - but as the entries piled up I realized this project was a better reflection of the kinds of worlds we live in than one finds in ordinary magazine articles.
Your correspondents weren't reporters writing about some new-to-them location after a visit and some drinks and dinners out - these were written by people whose lives are invested in the places where they live. It was still fun, but in combination, the posts have weight.

I couldn't have said it better, Annie, so I won't even try!

Because there are so many participants, I've divided the roundup into two posts, and I'll announce the winner and a special award at the end of the second post.

Thanks to David at kipili.com, I now know that Berowra is a suburb of Sydney, Australia, while Irena's Roots Run Deep in Toronto, Canada, where her post gave me a new appreciation for our country's largest city. Pam at Digging files her post about Austin under the topic Keep Austin Weird (which really, really makes me wish I could attend Spring Fling!) and Margaret tends her growing passion, which includes removing exotic invasives in favour of native plants, in Sydney AUSTralia. (do you suppose they're related, these two places? Both are on my must-visit lists!)

You would laugh if you could see me working on this post. I have two monitors, so one is open in Firefox, where I'm writing this post, and the other has about ten tabs open in Safari, as I visit and re-read each posting and collect the link. Though she was ridding herself of the epatoozies in Florida, Carolyn told us about her Sweet Home Chicago, which I think should be the site of a garden bloggers spring fling too. Because we have a collection of passionate gardeners in the Chicago area, and I learned a lot about the so-called Windy City from her gardening compadres, including Mr. McGregor's Daughter, who not only told us about the Snow Sculpting Competition, but also gave us a filmology look at the Chicago area in a second, really unique post. Then Linette, from southwest Ohio told us about her 19 acres of gardening bliss near Dayton, and tempted me with talk of Arboreta. Away in the southern Continent again, Blotanical's own guru, Stuart Robinson, told us about Busselton, home of the nearly 2 km long jetty. (It would become driftwood here in our tide, Stuart!

One of our more northerly participants would be Rosengeranium in Uppsala, Sweden, where she gardens indoors with great zeal and enthusiasm. She's quite a distance (as I can figure it) from Katarina in Gothenburg, where there's a botanical garden but Katarina's garden looks pretty impressive, too! How about living below sealevel, like Top Veg does on the well named Sunk Island in the United Kingdom? That would be pretty nervewracking for me, who likes to live above the water. Cows outnumber people in St, Lawrence county, New York, where John at Wiseacre tends his nursery and his fun new blog.

May Dreams Gardener Carol gave us top ten reasons why we'd love gardening in Indianapolis, and I'd have to agree with her. Jean shared some secrets of a southwest Georgia seed-scatterer, tempting me with the thoughts of things blooming yearround. Theresa, who gardens in Merida, Mexico, has different gardening challenges from her home state of Northern California, but she's accepted the challenges with enthusiasm. There are a lot of gardens I want to visit one day, and one would be Frances' Faire Garden, in southeast Tennessee (but I don't want to visit during Tornado season!)

I still haven't calculated just how many people from various provinces and states participated, but New York has its share of garden bloggers and homework presenters, including Sarah, who lives in Rochester, New York, where there are plenty of garden-themed places to visit and activities to do. Debi claims to live in the middle of nowhere, Alabama, but it sounds like a pretty nice place to live and http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifgarden, plus she and a friend started the , and that's a fine project! Anna has been keeping us entertained with her adventures, but also celebrating her North Carolina roots and the importance of family.

Our only Caribbean contribution comes from Nicole, born and raised in the islands in the sun. It's quite different from Gina, who tends her not-so-skinny garden in Forest Park near Chicago, which she observes needs to improve its rating on the green-o-meter. Lisa at Greenbow lives in Vincennes, Indiana which has French inspirations in its history and great agricultural connections. Janie in Texas told us about life in the gulf coast area where they garden yearround...sigh...while Vonlafin gardens in Lafayette, Indiana, and through her I learned how close her part of Indiana is to Chicago.

Another Sydney, Australia gardener, Chookie chimed in with links about her geography and climate from earlier posts, but also talked about an unsual shrub, the downy wattle, which sounds rather like a Shakespearean insult. Gardenista, on the other hand, is in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, way north of Kate in Regina, and in USA zone 2a but she sure manages to grow some great plants in her gardens. Crafty Gardener, who has several websites, gardens near Belleville, Ontario, is another gardener I'd dearly love to visit because of the great interest in seeds and seedpods as well as what's obviously a glorious garden. Carol (Cabs) lives in Amherst, the Massachusetts one rather than the Nova Scotian town, and it's a lovely rolling area near several colleges boasting great gardens.The ever enthusiastic Joy in Kingston wrote several posts about her city, (I've gone past it on the train en route to Toronto a couple of times) while Ross posted to us about Durban, Kwazulu Natal in sourthern Africa and tempted us with pictures of incredible plants, warm ocean waters and very handsome architecture. Looks pretty different, but no less beautiful and interesting, than Ewa's lovely communities in Poland. What a global community we garden bloggers are!

Whew....I need a bit of a break. I'll post the rest later tonight!

March madness, Watering Zen, and Gold stars for all!

This has been one of those weekends...First, let's begin with the weather. March did not come in like a lion OR a lamb. It came in like the Tasmanian devil from Bugs Bunny, a roaring, whirling, screeching maelstrom. Like many of you, we got clobbered with yet another snowstorm, which began yesterday and finally spent itself sometime this afternoon. Except the wind has been blowing pretty well banshee-speed since sometime last night. Crankily, I have refused to go outside all weekend, leaving LSS to do the outside chores: but in my defence, that's mostly because the crud in my knee grabbed hold and made even walking across the room difficult and very painful the past couple of days. While I'm used to chronic pain because of the ever-tiresome plague of fibromyalgia, this is more acute and makes me crabby.

And as sometimes happens when the weather goes absurd, our Internet connection became slow as March molasses, so while I could get people's comments approved and add any late homework, much of the time reading blogs and commenting was a bit more challenging. I also haven't commented back on my own posts to all your lovely comments over the past few posts. Suffice it to say I've read and enjoyed every one of them, and appreciate all the feedback you give, and for those who are new to visiting, I'll return the visit soon!


For all of you who have done posts for Garden Bloggers Geography Project, well done! If you haven't gotten your post done yet, or if it's not appearing on the lefthand column, just send it along between now and Wednesday evening. That gives you an extension, and me time to read again through all the posts that have come in already, and do a roundup post. In the meantime, you all deserve gold stars for your efforts, because they have been fascinating, entertaining, at times very amusing, and always informative.


Since I couldn't do much of anything else this weekend, I spent a great deal of time working: handling deadlines, doing research, cleaning up my office AND my harddrive (shudder!) and reading both for work and for pleasure. One of the for pleasure reads I've been savouring of late is Matthew Cohen's Zen of Watering Your Garden. Matt is a family physician who has gardened for more than fifty years, and who spent four years creating this lovely book of exquisite photographs and thoughts. Those four years have been well spent, because the result is a perfect gem of a garden-contemplation book.

In his foreword, Matt says he has two goals:

The first is to provide an experience which nurtures the reader's relationship with things that grow in the earth--and in the soul...My second goal is to inspire my readers to engage the garden in its own integrity and power. I use aphorisms, poetry, and other insightful observations--most found and some original--as companions to the plants in the photographs and as guides to the reader.

Every person needs a time and place to escape the troubles of the world around us, including the troubles that clutter our minds. Matt told me that he realized while hand-watering his Tallahassee, Florida, gardens that he felt a Zen-like experience--inner peace and clearing of the mind. While he says his is not a Zen garden as such, nor does he claim to be an ardent student of Zen, he finds a calm and spiritual connection while watering--the sound of the water, the smell of water caressing the plants, the play of light on water droplets on perfect flowers or cool green leaves.

"A garden can be anywhere something grows and is cared for," Matt writes, and this is so very true. Our gardens might be sprawling rural plots or a few clustered pots of flowers on a balcony. They may be meticulously groomed suburban landscapes or indoor gardens grown for food or pleasure. While Matt's favourite plants are orchids, specifically Laeliinae, with camellias, native plants and trees also tugging his gardening heart, the plant photographs in Zen of Watering Your Garden cover a wide spectrum, and each photo is beautifully matched to a text. Here, blades of grass are dusted with frost, while the accompanying text is a quote by Gretel Ehrlich. "Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons." Here, a pond with koi in it shimmers besides words from Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Yes, as everyone knows, mediation and water are wedded forever."
Beside a striking potted bonsai, a quote by Lao Tzu: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."

I asked if Matt had a favourite poem or aphorism in the book, and he pointed to me one by his 83-year-old father, Stanley Cohen. Beside a photograph of Gerbera daisies glistening with water droplets, his dad's words:

Watering, drooping leaves become alive,
Colourfull petals awake and thrive.
Sponging roots absorb and flourish
For the many seasons they will nourish.

I like this soothing little book of words and garden images very much--so much so that I keep it on my office desk, to help calm a cluttered mind when deadlines and emails and photos that need sorting and more deadlines and other commitments and a messy messy desk threaten to catch me up and away...I remind myself, as Lao Tzu said, that nature doesn't hurry, yet everything is accomplished.


This reminds me that while winter is not hurrying to leave, all things will work their way through. The mounds of snow will soon melt, the spring bulbs will smile skyward and leaves will open with a flourish, and all will be well again.

The Attack of the Dreaded Farch

Carolyn Gail of Sweet Home and Garden Chicago started us off with Garden Bloggers Muse Day a while back, and I"ve been contemplating whether to post today or tomorrow. Since in most years this would be March 1st, I figure today is as good a time as any.

“April,” we are told by the great poet TS Eliot in his epic poem The Waste Land, “is the cruelest month, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

Much as I love Eliot, he’s all wet on this one. That’s because he never endured the interminable attack of the dreaded Farch in Nova Scotia.

Farch, you say? What the heck is a Farch?

Farch is what some people know better as the months of February and March. But because they are interminable, obnoxious, and downright unpleasant, I tend to roll them into one loooonnnnnggggg month and call it Farch. And I like it just about as much as I like goutweed (and people KNOW how much I detest that justly-maligned plant.) This year, of course, Farch is even longer, thanks to today being a Leap Day. Like Carol at May Dreams Garden says, it would be nicer to have that extra day at a nicer time of the year, although those of us in the southern Hemisphere probably think that an extra late-summer day is just fine.

We've had the full meal deal of winter weather tantrums in the past couple of months, that's for sure. I don’t mind the cold or the snow. It’s the grey. Grey skies, grey landscapes, grey pavement and heaps of grey snow, more grey skies. Days the sun is out, no matter if it’s 40 below, I’m okay with it. But I’m starting to get impatient to be grubbing in the dirt, bringing home new ‘groceries for the garden’ in the form of plants and more plants and accents and garden art and mushroom compost...pruning and cleaning up and making new beds and hardening off seedlings and doing all those other wonderful things that we do.

It's still too early to plant most seedlings indoors here, because they can't be transplanted outside until at least May, unless I decide to put something in the greenhouse for supplemental heat. I did sow a bunch of catgrass, to keep the cat-children from chewing on my houseplants. And while I didn't get that azalea I talked about, the orchid show is tomorrow and Sunday, and we do plan to trek into Halifax for a bit of that. So who knows what might get to come home with us?

And despite reading all kinds of other blogs, I'm just beginning to feel really bludgeoned by the weather. I want to see this sight in my own garden.


I'd even welcome seeing this, snow and all:


Of course, I’ve been pushing back the greys by keeping busy with work, reading all kinds of new books, browsing through catalogues and magazines and websites, and tending the plants here in the house. They tell me that spring will come, as they’ve started to wake up from their resting period and put on new growth. And if it weren't for all of you posting about your gardening adventures or plans, and taking part in the Garden Bloggers Geography Project, I'd be even more winter-beaten. Thanks to all of you who have done posts for the project, and I'll be doing a wrapup over the weekend.

Okay, you've talked me out of being gloomy. Maybe we’re only midway through Farch. But just writing about gardening makes me realize that soon it will be time to be outside getting ready for another season’s floral promises and memories. And tomatoes.

Where in the Gardening World are YOU?

Sometimes, a little distraction is good.

As I watch the latest snow fall down outside my window, I’m supposed to be finishing up a couple of projects. But sometimes a turn of phrase just won’t come out the way we want it to, and a little diversion is needed.

We all converse with bloggers in different parts of the world from us. Naturally, we’re all in different time zones. Some are as close as one hour’s difference (Ontario, Rhode Island, Maine, etc are an hour behind me on Atlantic Standard Time) while others, like Stuart in Australia, are 13 hours ahead—well into tomorrow. Before I went looking up maps, I found a handy chart of times across the world, and that gave me some idea of what time some of you not in North America are on. Then I had to decide what part of what continent people were in. (I’m using Stuart for an example here because he’s about the further away of my bloggin’ buds.) I knew he was in Western Australia, but not exactly where Busselton was.

So naturally, I took the time to look it up. (I did say I needed a break, didn’t I?) Busselton is about 220 km from Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and home to what is said to be the longest wooden structure in the southern hemisphere, the Busselton Jetty, nearly two kilometers in length stretching out into the ocean. Just looking at it made me dizzy!

Now, this got me thinking. It’s been a long time since I took geography, but it’s a fascinating subject—especially when looked at through a gardener’s eyes. Look at Yolanda Elizabet, in Dinteloord, in the province of Noord Brabant, the Netherlands. Who knew (besides Europeans who are better travelled than us new worlders) that the Netherlands had provinces? I know a bit about Kate's neck of the woods because I've been to the Prairies (though not to Saskatchewan) but can YOU uickly locate her province on a map of Canada? And how many who don't live in the United States knew that Rhode Island, where Blithewold and Layanee are ISN'T an island? You see what I mean?

So I’m throwing a challenge out to all other garden bloggers to embark on something I’m calling Garden Bloggers Geography Project. All you have to do is write a post (or two or three, if you want—remember, my theory is rules are made to be broken). Tell your readers a bit about your hometown, your state, province…something that really tells us where you are in the world. What’s really special about your community? Pretend you’re trying to entice visitors to the region, and remember—what might be obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to even the blogger in the community next door. Use maps, photos, whatever you want, so long as it’s not too hard for people to load. (Not everyone is on highspeed, and videos can be frustrating for those on dialup.)

When you get your post done, come and leave a comment here in this post. You can also link back, or use the bizarre little graphic I’ve made up above (just don’t laugh at it); whatever you want to do to spread the word and join in the fun. We’ll give this project a deadline—the 29th of February, to acknowledge that this IS a leap year.

Now, in school, we got grades, or gold stars or detentions, if we didn’t do our homework. No detentions here, of course, but here’s a bit of an enticement. I’ll visit all the postings over the next couple of weeks, and select the one I like the best. And the prize, though it might not be screamingly relevant for some of you, will be a copy of my book, The Atlantic Gardener’s Greenbook. Now, if you’ve already got one, that doesn’t disqualify you—you can give it as a gift to someone else. Or sell it on EBay, or whatever you wish. I’ll contact the winning blogger, announce that person here, and mail the book off to wherever that day. How’s that sound for an enticement?

Ready? Let the projects begin!