Last March, my husband, Jeff, and I purchased a well-landscaped home just outside of Asheville, NC. I'd dabbled in gardening before, but mostly with the container gardening variety due to the fact that we had always rented and never stayed put for too long (it is a bit of an understatement to say that I have "issues" with permanence, but that's another post!). Having moved into our new home in the winter, we had no idea what was in store for us gardening-wise, and committed to leaving our half-acre property "as is" for one year until we knew exactly what plants would be blooming. It was obvious, even in the wintertime, that our house's former owner was an avid gardener; there were mulched beds, evergreen shrubs, and numerous bare stems and sticks that lay dormant during the cold weather.
Spring brought with it an impressive collection of daffodils,hyacinths, lilies, and other "bulbed" plants, as well as forsythias, phlox and candy tuft. I shared online photos of our beautiful new blooming property with family and friends, some of whom, who had not read my captions, assumed I was showcasing pictures of a local, manicured park. This reaction was certainly well-received by Jeff and I, but it also brought about a bit of intimidation on my end with the realization that I was going to have to tend to all of this and I had little idea how.
As the months and seasons changed, so did the flora in our property. Thankfully, my mother is a seasoned gardener and was available to answer most of my seemingly endless questions about what the latest plant to erupt was or how much water each plant needed. I would often snap a photo of a particular plant and email it to her for advice. At some point during mid-summer I realized that I should have been cataloging my new plants somehow, that it would have been helpful to have had a labeled photo of each plant, along with a brief description of when it first bloomed and any advice my mom (or books, or online resources, etc.) gave me. Since I use digital photography, I thought about different avenues for online cataloging and decided that I would begin such a program during the new year.
Somewhere around this same time, I became engrossed in some of my friends' blogs and found myself inspired to write. Thanks to these friends (whose blogs I'll gladly share on this site), I had all kinds of ideas floating around in my mind and I was reminded that, for years and years, a long time ago, writing was not only an important creative outlet for me, but instrumental to my mental well-being, as well. An idea was born! What if I could somehow fuse my online gardening catalog with some of these creative snippets, as well as personal stories of my joys and challenges as a mother, my triumphs and frustrations with spirituality, and other general depictions of my everyday life?! Perhaps I would even find patterns and connections between and among some of these areas! Even if no one was interested in reading such a beast, at the very least
, I would surely benefit in some way.
So, there you have it...my very first post, over half a year in the making! It would feel inauthentic not to mention that as I write this, my 2-year-old daughter, Sophie, who is suffering from bronchitis, keeps waking up from her supposed and well-needed nap, screaming hysterically. I've had to console her about nine times since starting this. So much for inspired creativity!
