I love looking into other people's gardens. Each garden seems to say something about its gardener in a way that's as intriguing and mysterious as the unique slant, velocity and pressure on the page of an individual's cursive hand. Some of what a garden tells about the gardener seems obvious: compact plants predominate in the garden of a garden friend who's shorter in stature, while six-plus foot heliopses, towering hanging baskets and statuesque potted tropical shrubs populate the garden of another garden friend whom I look up to in more ways than one. (The garden of this average-height gardener follows the "eye-level" theme as well, with tall plants as the backdrop and short plants as border accents to a vast army of mid-sized plants.) And maybe genteel pastels mirror a gentle soul, while exuberant primary colors are the natural expression of an extrovert's outsized enthusiasm. But these generalizations are anecdotal at best, likely inaccurate, and mostly not even the point. When I'm in someone's garden, I get a sense of the gardener in a way that can't quite be expressed in words. (Which, by the way, is not at all affected by the garden's state of housekeeping. Weeds are irrelevant! Which I ought to remember every time I'm tempted to panic at the prospect of someone approaching my garden.)
I love looking into other people's gardens, but I am mostly too reserved to invite myself in, even with (or, I should say, especially with) gardeners that I know well. And so I observe and appreciate (or spy on and lurk about) other gardens by reading garden writing on blogs, including most of those in Kathy Purdy's terrific series of interviews with garden blog pioneers (nine parts in all; the link will take you to part one, with each part containing a further link to the next part of the series). Garden writing worth reading, whether in print or in pixels, isn't merely, or really, about the whats and hows of the same old things (not gonna use the phrase "perennial topics" here)—whether daylilies, blackspot, foraging four-legged creatures, or the caprice of weather. When I read about your garden, I want to know what floats your boat or (to steal my seven-year-old's latest favorite phrase) grinds your gears. The essence of the pleasure of reading a dozen, or a hundred, good garden writers—long may they proliferate—is getting to experience each writer's unique mix of humours. (Yours truly? The melancholic, diluted with the phlegmatic, with occasional bubbles of the sanguine, and tinges of bile, mostly during Japanese beetle season.) The best garden writing, as with the best writing, answers the question that I always pose in my mind to a writer that I want to find worth reading: How are you finding this life?
Of course, garden blogging isn't immune from the tension between doing for love and doing for money. (Which is where I get to say, "Thank goodness I'm an amateur.") If life were fair, gardening magazines would be filled with the bylines of the garden bloggers that I most enjoy, and I'd be rushing to open their covers instead of setting them on the shelf for future, mostly indifferent perusal. To those whose value should be, but isn't, recognized or remunerated, I say: Even deserved fame is fleeting (Lou Grant to Mary Richards: "Look at Winston Churchill. Great man. Probably the greatest man of the century. When was the last time you heard anyone mention Winston Churchill?"). And an out-of-print copy of Thomas Mann's Joseph The Provider from the used-book counter, with the price of thirty-eight cents, speaks volumes about the half-life of commercial and critical success. "Traction" is not the slope of a stats chart but the staying power of your writing. There are blog posts that I've read from years past, and even from blogs that have gone to 404 heaven, which still resonate as much as a well-remembered conversation with an old friend. Those are the blogs that I want to read (and, I hope, to write once in a while). So plants grow, bloom, set seed, and die in mindless cyclicity, and who cares? Except that we're still reading Virgil's Georgics, and Karel Čapek, and Henry Mitchell, and with any luck will be reading even more from those who happily travel along the same dusty road. I'm grateful for and grateful to the garden blog pioneers for widening the path. Go pioneers!