Garden Bloggers
Garden bloggers are mad, wonderful people. Surely the second best pleasure in life, after real gardening, is writing about it. And the third? Definitely reading what another mad gardener has written!
I Blog, Therefore I Am...
There we all are, taking wobbly photographs of the first crocus, hedgehogs, autumn leaves, and snow on our gardens, all reporting in to whoever wants to read us. Perhaps nobody will read us - but we don't care! I blog - therefore I am...
Moosey Paper Journals
Consider the Great Siblinghood of Global Amateur Gardeners. Our thoughts sweep from the semi-infinite (an arbotetum) to the tiny (a new little alpine Lewissia). We love our roses - we worry about our roses - we envy other gardeners' roses. We dig and we weed and we put plants in pots - very repetitive activities, and potentially very boring. Some of us chronicle our snail-paced progress in desperate detail. This is not boring - this is true garden blogging!
Years ago, in the pre-blogger days pf the internet, the first Moosey website was launched, as a Mothers' Day present from computer-savy elder son. Your garden journals must go 'up', directed my web-master. Up where? Whatever for? Who on earth would read them?
I faithfully typed up all the scribblings from notebooks I could find, starting from 1997. Earlier pieces of paper contained lists of roses copied from books, and silly garden plans full of ridiculous plants - like Kalmias (too dry) and Fuchsias (too frosty). For reasons of authenticity (what year was that?) I missed these out.
I scanned in some archive photographs - I wish I'd taken more of the tree-less paddocks, the bare pond, and so on. Then cross-checking was needed to get the dates right - gardeners are a vague breed. For example, on the 31st September 1998 I did an awful lot of digging in the Septic Tank Border... Hello....
Daffodil Planter :- Daffodil Planter is my favourite garden blogger - you'll really enjoy her blog.
So the Moosey 'Blog' was one of the first of the squillions of journals and diaries let loose in the internet universe. Eleven years' worth of listing, raving, twittering, grumping, humphing, philosophising, detailing, metaphorising (?), making up words, trying to be funny while staying alive... Now it's but a tiny, tenacious weed in the uber-garden of blogs. And there are so many (other?) brilliant gardener-writers out there. Hee hee - how the garden has grown!
What constitutes a good garden blogger? I've made a short list, so you can see if your favourite blogger makes the grade.
Good Garden Bloggers:
- Are real.
- Are personal, but not too personal.
- Unconditionally love their gardens.
- Write about weeds and garden messes as well as the pretty things.
Good garden blogs are serious and funny, thought-provoking, eloquent, hard-hitting and light-hearted... They say exactly what you've been trying to say for months. And usually they say it heaps better! One final question - when should a blogger gather up his or her leaves, pull up the tap root and retire to the compost heap? When the inspiring turns into the tedious? Hmm...