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Garden journal can go beyond the practical
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Gardeners usually keep journals for practical purposes like tracking the weather and remembering when flowers bloom. But another payoff comes while leisurely paging through old journals and being reminded of those interesting, surprising and even ethereal moments that dot the seasons.
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Published: June 3, 2009
On Oct. 22, 1994, I was on my knees, planting daffodils and glory-of-the-snow beneath an oak tree, when I paused for a moment and lay back on the lawn to take in the beauty around me — bright sun, perfect temperatures, a bit of fall foliage and plenty of birdsong.
I can remember this perfectly — almost re-experience it — because I wrote it down in my gardening journal that same weekend and recently came across it.
Gardeners usually begin keeping journals for the many practical benefits: there's no better way to keep track of when the first freeze comes, where you planted those peonies, how many times you failed with sweet peas, whether the lilacs were in bloom on Mother's Day and what you added to the planting hole when you put in those marvelous roses.
A good journal will also remind you when the aphids usually arrive, so you can make sure to hose them off early. It can save money, too: Every fall, when the mail-order catalogs put me into a trance and tempt me to order hundreds of crocuses, I can find written evidence that the squirrels in my yard eat crocus blossoms — every year, just as they're about to open.
Gardening is a long-term proposition, and after a few years the ordinary memory can't hold all the needed information. Thus the journal, which can be as simple as a notebook or as sophisticated as a computer file, complete with embedded photos.
(Pictures add a lot, even if it's just a few snapshots tossed into the pages. It can be amazing to see how small that azalea once was, or what the side yard looked like before the oak was taken down.)
I use a preprinted book that includes useful seasonal tips for every region of the country. Each open page holds one week's entry — the fourth week of June, say — for three consecutive years.
At first, I felt I had to fill each space, but I gave that up: There really isn't much going on in my garden in February, and I'm entitled to a vacation now and again.
My entries usually start as a quick jotting on the index card I usually carry around in the garden. I'll transfer that to the journal when I get a chance. Luckily, I'm the only one who has to decipher the handwriting, because it's usually done hastily.
But sometimes what happens in the garden is funny, surprising or even inspirational enough that I'll take my time and write a solid paragraph or two, and looking back at them has been the biggest payoff for me in two decades of journal keeping. For example:
— The Hitchcock Holly. One day in April 2001, hundreds of robins invaded our female holly tree in late afternoon and feasted for hours on the berries. I wrote that my wife and I laughed out loud as the 15-foot tree came alive with the birds' constant in-and-out movement, each robin seeming to alternate between snacking and waiting on a nearby telephone wire for another turn.
— The Backyard Massacre. On a wet morning in 1993, I finally gave up on beer traps and liquid poisons and walked through the garden with a salt shaker in each hand, pitilessly hunting slugs. It was no fun watching them writhe as the salt desiccated their slimy bodies, but I was determined to take back my landscape. According to my journal entry, I lost count after dispatching 170 of the slimy pests.
"Could almost hear them scream," I wrote.
— The Day of Light. I came home from work one evening in 1990 to find our back windows flooded with sunlight — even though they face east. The tree men had done their work, removing the dozen or so ailing, 30-foot-tall hemlocks that edged our back property line. The new sun exposure transformed the yard from "bright shade" to "full sun," multiplying the gardening possibilities.
Looking back through old journals will also reveal a gardener's own evolution. I can see that I came only slowly to perennials and shrubs after leaning heavily on annuals and bulbs. I also seem to be more allergic to poison ivy than I used to be. And for some reason, my irrational hatred of mowing our small lawn has only gotten worse.
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