About

It’s about the garden, not the gardener

Recently, someone suggested to me that I start a garden blog and this time, the idea just seemed ripe. Years ago, someone else had suggested I write a gardening book. My hesitation then (and even now) is that I don’t consider myself to be a master gardener of any sort. There are so many terrific gardening books, landscape designers and resources out there. Though I’ve gardened most of my life, and especially the last 20 years, there is always so much more to learn. So, I don’t consider myself an expert or to have a perfect garden. Quite the contrary. But I’d like to offer encouragement, share photos and stories, and offer whatever tips and resources might be helpful to both new and seasoned gardeners in Sonoma County, California and elsewhere–a chat over the garden fence with friends, as it were.

Though the current garden is on 5 acres, I’ve gardened in a variety of spaces. In many ways, small yards are my favorite because you can nurture them with great care. Though we’re grateful to have the space to grow fruit trees, berries, herbs, mushrooms, veggies and lavender, the size of it constantly gets away from us. It’s endless, read: compulsive. But there are worse things to be compulsive about! Gardening is good exercise, provides healthy food, habitat for small creatures, and is a wonderful form of therapy.

When I speak about gardening, it’s so intertwined with other lifestyle elements for me that I will be including those as well–just for fun. It certainly includes growing fruits and veggies, herbs and flowers, habitat plants for bees and butterflies, and landscaping plants. But it also flows nicely with recycling, up-cycling, expressing joy through creativity, and just sitting in the living aliveness of it all.

A note about the site name:

When I meet people and am asked about myself, I often say I’m an introverted, incurable night-owl and a compulsive gardener. 🙂 So, when it came to creating this site, naturally I gravitated towards “the compulsive gardener” as a domain name. Turns out, there are a lot of us compulsive gardeners! This is amusing and shouldn’t have been a surprise. I tried to think of other names to avoid redundancy, but alas they also were already taken. So I was forced into a variation of the original idea, and just hope the other compulsive gardeners out there won’t mind me joining the online allotment garden of similar names! This site is obviously “the-compulsive-gardener.com” — with hyphens.

Maybe someday another name will occur to me that has never been used, meanwhile, here’s sending my goodwill and good wishes to the rest of my compulsive gardening compeers!