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:
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |





