Find Your Inner Gardener!
Becoming a gardener in action as well as mind is a process of development. Knowledge and pleasure increase over time, experience accruing year after year. The tips below will help set you on the path to developing your own garden sensibility and style. As spring comes in, exciting us to do...something, anything, everything outdoors, seize that energy to develop your own inner gardener!
Noticing: Start by paying attention - to the weather, how it affects your plants in the garden, what frost looks like on your evergreen shrubs, when the trees leaf out, when they bloom and when they drop their leaves. What weather preceded the sudden leaf drop on your big maple? When did the magnolia buds start to develop and when did they finally unfurl? What day was the first daffodil bloom in your garden? You don’t have to keep a diary, but many gardeners find it helpful. Some use a datebook, and at each date entry, simply write a few lines. Here’s how Elizabeth Lawrence tells us her mother’s date book looked for the date of February 9:
Fair and Warm. Lunch and tea out
Scilla taurica
Narcissus Grand Monarque
Forsythia
Ellen’s Birthday
This system might work for you - it is undemanding and efficient. We like the notes about a few events of the day - the better to help recall just what that day was like in the garden. The flower names give notation about what is blooming in the garden that day. (From A Southern Garden, for details see Sources.)
A entry for our own garden near Atlanta might say:
February 28, 2008
24 degrees at 7:30 am, last 2 nights, hard freeze
Daffodils: Ice Follies, Jetfire, King Alfred
Scabiosa, Candy stripe creeping phlox, Mazus repens
Prostrate rosemary, candytuft
Transplanted strawberries to new garden
A Garden Tour: Take a tour of your own garden as often as you can, every day if possible. When you return from a trip away, be sure to have a look around before you go to bed. It is the goal of many a gardener to have something in bloom every day of the year, some little blossom to put in water on the desk or breakfast table. Pay attention to leaf color, how the yellow foliage of a variegated hosta pops out on a cloudy day, that the Elephant Ears seem to get too much sun at the corner of the house, that the white bare branches of the Sycamore are like an Ansel Adams photograph against the cloudless blue sky.
Then, branch out from your own garden to those of your vicinity. As you drive down your street, through your neighborhood, as you walk the dog - what do you see? Do you admire the neighbor’s shrub and wonder what it is? Do you love the tidy garden three houses down? Could you implement a path to the garbage bins as attractive as the one at the house around the corner? This will lead you to some thinking about your own garden, what you like in your own, what you like in others’ gardens.
Deconstruct what you see. Why does that house on the way to work have such curb appeal? Is it the tidiness, the symmetry? What would you like to imitate or plant that you have seen around town? This will help inform you of what blooms where you live much more than any book will.
Read. If you have not read many gardening books, start with ones that tell stories of the gardening life, such as by E. Lawrence, Vita Sackville West, Beverly Nichols, Celestine Sibley. These books won’t have any pictures, so you might not be sure about which plants they are discussing. So keep by you a couple of good plant catalogs (see Plant Sources) or a big A-Z book of plants with photos (see literary Sources.) Not up to reading that sort of book yet? Start with plant and seed catalogs and look up information about the plants you observe that grow near you in the catalogs or a plant reference book.
Develop a special interest or plan. Are you really interested in the little bulbs that bloom in late winter? Would you like to start a vegetable bed? This is a good place to start to begin to inform yourself. Read books about your subject, search for web sites about that subject, ask other gardeners about their experiences.
And finally, as spring approaches - channel your excitement about all the heady new growth towards making some of your garden dreams come true. Make a plan, research the plants and materials, plot out a work plan based on your available time, and go to it. Your garden loving friends at gardeningforlove.com wish you much joy and happiness in your garden this...
SPRING
"Let no one be discouraged by the thought of how much there is to learn. Looking back on nerly thirty years of gardening (the earlier part of it in groping ignorance with scant means of help), I can remember no part of it that was not full of pleasure and encouragement....And the garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all, it teaches entire trust." - Gertrude Jekyll, Wood and Garden. (See Literary Sources)
Photo above by reader Diana in Atlanta, of her own garden, May, 2008.
