With this post, I am inaugurating a new monthly feature on my blog. Recently, Jodi at Bloomingwriter began a very lively discussion about “Encouraging Our Fellow Gardening Bloggers.” Although I have been blogging less than six months, I am feeling ready to pay forward some of the wonderful encouragement and mentoring I’ve received from others. So, each month I am going to focus attention on one or more newly discovered garden blogs. I will feature these blogs on my sidebar and also write a post introducing them in more detail.

For this first month, I began with the list of garden blogs added to Blotanical in the past two weeks. My intention was to choose one (or at most, two) of these; but when I started trying to make a selection, I found that I couldn’t leave out any of these three. My selection criteria were very subjective, looking for blogs whose content and style I found useful, interesting, compelling, or entertaining. I also tried to focus on relatively new blogs that were less well known. (All other things being equal, I would choose a blog with only 10 followers over one with 50 followers.) So, in February, I invite you to join me in exploring the following garden blogs:

	Children of the Corm is a brand new blog, only a few weeks old and with 5 posts so far. The blog is organized around the author’s adventure in renovating the 1910 house and garden of a Charleston, South Carolina property. Jess has a wonderful way of painting word pictures, and I was completely captivated by her first post about falling in love with her mother’s garden. I look forward to hearing and seeing more about her new Charleston garden as her plans for it develop.
	Livingin22 is another new blog, this one an account of rural life in Brittany, France. While I was scrolling through new garden blogs, I was brought to a full stop by the stunning photograph of ice patterns on a window at the top of this one. While Brittany Girl includes charming accounts of her farm animals, it is the photographs that I can’t tear my eyes away from. (I am happy to see that she has renamed the ice patterns photo “Winter Light” and entered it in the Gardening Gone Wild photo contest for February.) This blog seems to have begun as a way to keep in touch with family and friends back in England. As the author reaches out for a broader audience, I look forward to some posts that will provide more context about her property, the village, the blog title, etc. And I also look forward to more of those wonderful photographs.
	The Idiot Gardener has been around a bit longer than the other two blogs featured here – a few months rather than a few weeks. Whether or not the author is an idiot about gardening remains to be seen, but he is very clearly not an idiot about writing. This is polished work by a talented comic writer. Every post made me laugh aloud. The posts have a strong sense of sequential narrative, and it is easy to imagine this blog as the precursor to a published memoir or novel. Indeed, I longed to sit down with these posts in book form so that I could go from one to the next without being tethered to my computer. The serial nature of the narrative is a great strength, but as the number of posts grows, the author will need to develop strategies for orienting new readers to his story. For now, I strongly recommend that you begin by reading the first post, Why I Hate Gardening.

Last week, we had unseasonably warm temperatures and heavy rain here in Maine. One night, I checked the deck thermometer at 3:00 a.m. to find that it read 45F; this is 40-50 degrees higher than our typical overnight lows in January! Throughout this “January thaw,” I kept an anxious eye on the snow pack in my garden. While gardeners in more temperate climates may worry about how a freak snowstorm will harm their plants, cold climate gardeners worry about how the absence of snow might harm theirs.

I’m not denying that snow and (especially) ice can create problems in the garden. During the great ice storm of January 1998, when Maine and Quebec experienced several days of freezing rain followed by frigid temperatures, tree damage was enormous. During the long, dark (powerless) nights, the booming sound of cracking, breaking and splitting trees was like cannon fire. Almost all trees lost limbs, and many large, venerable old trees simply split apart under the weight of all that ice.  Even a more ordinary winter event, heavy snow and ice avalanching off roofs, can do serious damage to shrubs planted below.

But in this part of the world, snow is primarily a beneficent presence in the garden. Here, as in other snowy regions, farmers sometimes refer to snow as “white manure,” presumably because it locks up moisture during the dormant season and then releases it into the soil in spring to nurture new growth. Even more importantly, snow is a great insulator. For perennials that have died back to the ground in fall and whose roots stay alive beneath the ground to produce new growth in spring, the insulating qualities of snow are a boon. An insulating blanket of snow helps to maintain a steady temperature and prevent the frost/thaw cycles that can heave plants out of the ground. And the steady temperature that snow helps to maintain is considerably warmer than the coldest ambient air temperatures. Thus a plant that is rated hardy to –15F or –20F can easily survive nights of –25F or lower if it is under several feet of snow.

I have learned that years of heavy snow will be good years in the spring and summer garden. Two years ago, when we had snow early and often and the snow pack in my garden at the beginning of March was almost 5’ deep, I found parsley (not normally a plant that winters over here) alive and happily putting up new growth when the snow melted in April. It is in winters with little snow, especially if they also have extremely cold  temperatures, that I can expect to mourn my garden losses in spring.

When our brief thaw ended last week, I was happy to see that, although there was some bare ground showing around trees and along the foundation of the house, most my garden was still covered by at least 6 inches of snow. As so often happens in late January, the balmy temperatures of the thaw were followed immediately by strong winds and biting cold. Even a relatively thin blanket of snow can help to protect my plants from these temperature extremes. I’m hoping that the rest of the winter will bring more beneficial snow, with its promise of a beautiful, bountiful spring, to my garden.

In 1998, on my first visit to the UK, I spent a week in London. One day, I set off on the Underground to visit The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew – and was totally blown away by the beauty I found. I spent the whole day at Kew, staying (if I remember correctly) until they threw me out at closing time.  And I seem to have spent most of my time either snapping the shutter on my camera or with my eyes popping and my mouth hanging open.

I was still a novice gardener at this point in my life, so what was most exciting about my first visit to Kew was discovering new plants. When I look back at the photographs I took that day, I seem to have been most taken with the discovery of plants grown in more temperate and tropical climates and with new varieties of familiar plants. I was particularly excited to get my first glimpse of a Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia reginae) bloom and to suddenly understand its name. Among the familiar plants, I spent hours looking at varieties of poppies, roses, irises, and rhododendron.

By the time I visited Kew Gardens again a few years later, I was at a different stage in my development as a gardener, and I saw the gardens differently. I still took hundreds of close-up photos of beautiful blooms,

but I also paid attention this time to the aesthetic effects created by combinations of plants and the layout of plants in the landscape,

and to trees.

	An exhibit of African stone sculptures placed in the landscape was a special treat during this visit to Kew. (The combination of beautiful gardens and beautiful art is my idea of heaven.) Among my favorites were these birds nestled in a meadow
	and these children playing leapfrog in the grass.

When I look back on this last visit to Kew Gardens, one of the things that surprises me is that I kept no record to identify plants. It’s time for me to go back to Kew again. The gardens have changed since I was there last, and so have I. I would love to experience the Xstrata treetop walkway. This time, I would pay attention to plant identification, making special notes on those that might be suitable for my own garden. Having recently read Andrea Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners, which includes an account of the origins of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, I would also pay much more attention to the geographic origins of the plants and to the order beds, where herbaceous plants are arranged according to botanic classifications.

Kew Gardens is open every day except Christmas eve and Christmas. It is easily accessible by public transport, and once inside the gardens, you can take advantage of the Kew Explorer for getting around. If you have never visited Kew Gardens, I recommend that you add it to your wish list!

Recently, Rebecca of Prefer To Be in the Garden did a delightful blog post on rainbow colors in the garden and invited other garden bloggers to find the colors of the rainbow in their own gardens.

As you can see below, I decided on a fairly literal interpretation of the rainbow, with horizontal bands of color shading from red to violet.

(Holding the cursor on any of the images above will reveal a caption. You can also enlarge any image by clicking on it. All photos were taken by me.)

Finding the images to fill in these bands of color was a fun challenge, and I spent some up-close-and-personal time with my photo archives. The yellows and blues were easiest for me, since these are the predominant colors of my garden. All the images in these bands and in the green band are from my own garden. For orange and violet, I also included some images from gardens I have visited. Red was the greatest challenge for me; this is the only band in which I could not include any images from my own garden (unless you count the red cyclamen that grows on a light-filled window ledge inside my house).

Alas, rainbows are as rare a sight in my garden as red flowers; the tall trees that grow on all sides of my property obstruct the view of any rainbows that might be present.  But I can offer this rainbow, photographed from the ferry coming into Juneau, Alaska in June, 1996.

The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) is a compelling account of the rise of ornamental gardening as a passionate pastime for the English middle classes as well as the elite, and the spread of that passion from England to other parts of the world. Wulf ties the rise of gardening as “an obsession” to the rise of the British empire, to the 18th century philosophy of the Enlightenment, and to the development of scientific botany.

Wulf is trained as a design historian and this is a work of social history, but she writes with the sensibility of a novelist. She organizes her story around the relationships among six “brother gardeners" – plant collectors, botanists and obsessive gardeners – beginning with the transatlantic arrangement by which John Bartram, a Pennsylvania farmer and plant collector, shipped boxes of seeds and live plants to Peter Collinson, a London merchant and gardener. It was “Bartram’s Boxes,” which Collinson sold through a subscription system, that supplied the great houses and the new commercial nurseries of England with North American trees, shrubs and flowers, and that fueled the development of English-style gardens and the English obsession with gardening in the 18th century. In successive chapters, Wulf builds her story out in concentric circles and forward in time from the central relationship between Collinson and Bartram. Because her cast of characters are introduced gradually, one at a time, and because she provides a fully realized character portrait of each, the reader finds it easy to keep them straight. The great sweep of historical events is also made accessible because it is viewed through the experiences, friendships and rivalries of these men.

The following passage, about the gardening world that Daniel Solander, a student of Carl Linnaeus and one of the six “brother gardeners,” found when he arrived in London in 1760, will give you the flavor of Wulf’s writing:

While Solander walked in awe under the ruffled canopy of American trees, others began to ridicule the new English obsession. Horace Walpole, mocking himself as much as his fellow gardeners, was so amused by the preoccupation with meandering rivers and “shrubberies planted of all kinds of exotics” that he was waiting for someone to propose the alteration of Jerusalem “in the modern style.” Others were even more specific and lampooned garden owners such as Collinson’s old acquaintance the Duke of Argyll, who adored his garden at Whitton near Twickenham so much that he planted it before he built his house. A newspaper depicted him as an obsessive gardener who dragged his grudging and hungry guests, still wearing their slippers, through his groves. (p. 142)

[An aside: Both behaviors for which the Duke of Argyll was ridiculed seem perfectly reasonable to me!]

Wulf’s book covers much of the 18th century, including numerous European wars and the American revolution, British explorations and colonization in Australia, Asia, the West Indies, the South Pacific, and Africa, the development of scientific botany, and, of course, the development of gardens as we know them today. I loved The Brother Gardeners; and if you are interested in gardens or gardening, in the origins of our garden styles and the plants we grow, in botany, or in history, I think you will love it too.

In addition to all the wonderful English gardens that trace their origins back to this period and which are often featured in garden blogs, it is also possible to visit the home and garden of John Bartram, the man whose plant collecting started it all, in Philadelphia.