Two Years in the Virtual Garden

It was two years ago today that I clicked “publish” and sent the first post of Jean’s Garden out into cyberspace. I’m not entirely sure what my motivations were. A friend asked me if I had “ever thought about writing a garden blog” at a time when I didn’t even know what a blog was, and her question piqued my interest. I had been wishing for a way to share my garden and my emotional responses to it with others, and I also had an interest in trying my hand at a different, more creative style of writing than was possible in my professional work. A garden blog seemed to fill the bill.

Jean’s Garden has definitely fulfilled those hopes. The kind of discipline a blog imposes has provided an opportunity to improve my writing; I have even begun to entertain the dream of publishing a book of garden essays that would consist of more polished versions of some of these blog posts. The extent to which the blog has allowed me to share my garden was brought home to me this year when I published several posts about a new garden project, the serenity garden. Dozens of readers followed the progress of this project and shared my pleasure when the plants finally went in the ground this month.

This brings me to some of the unexpected pleasures of garden blogging. The first of these is the international community of gardeners and garden bloggers that I now find myself a member of. I don’t really know who I expected to read my blog (I don’t think I had given it much thought), but I didn’t anticipate the extent to which writing a blog would involve me in a community of bloggers who read one another’s blogs and provide encouragement and support to one another. My new virtual gardening friends have enriched my life.

Another unexpected aspect of garden blogging has been photography. When I began, I thought about writing, but not about visual images; I quickly learned, however, how important photographs are as a central feature of garden blogs. Writing a garden blog has gotten me out into the garden with my camera on a regular basis, and it has reconnected me with the kind of nature photography that first captured my interest more than four decades ago. After a lapse of many years, I am once again reading about photography and trying to improve my technique; and I am finally learning to use the capabilities of my digital SLR. Garden photographs have become another important way to share my garden with others, particularly in the Jean’s Garden gift calendars (see A Year of Gifts from the Garden and A New Year in the Garden) that have become a big hit with my family and friends.

I also didn’t anticipate the extent to which writing a garden blog would improve my knowledge and understanding of gardening. This has happened in a number of different ways. First, I often find that I need to do research to gather information before I write. Second, writing about  gardening and garden design has deepened my understanding and made me a more aware, thoughtful and intentional gardener. Third, I have gained enormous amounts of new knowledge from reading others’ garden blogs and through the comments that other gardeners leave on my blog.

An anniversary provides the occasion for analyzing blog statistics. In the early days, almost no one read my blog. There were more than 100 page views the first week, as friends and family visited in response to a mass email, but most of them did not come back. Some posts published in the two weeks after that were not read by anyone at all. I began to list my blog on blog directories in an attempt to reach potential readers, and that led me to Blotanical. My participation in this garden blogging community helped me to develop a core of regular readers and was key to establishing my blog in the first year.

In the second year, numbers of page views and of readers have continued to grow, and I have noticed that many of these now come to my blog via search engines. These readers are not looking for the kind of emotional/spiritual reflections on gardening that I originally imagined myself writing in this blog; they are looking for information. Thus, an early post about the iris budfly (Battling the Iris Budfly) that no one read the first week it was up now gets read regularly as people try to figure out what’s happening to their irises, and three of my five most popular posts (see the sidebar listing) are portraits of particular plants. (Who knew so many people out there were interested in learning more about tradescantia?) It turns out that my strength as a writer is conveying information in a clear and engaging way (not surprising, since this is a skill that I have honed over 35 years of teaching) and that garden blogging is more connected with my professional work than I could have imagined.

I know that many garden bloggers find the third year difficult as the inexorable demands of blogging begin to seem more burdensome than pleasurable. Right now, though, I am excited to see what my third year in the virtual garden will bring.