The members gardened in locations all over the US, delighting in plant identification games, color combination ideas, poetry and jokes as well as the kind of “what’s blooming in my garden” updates that are still around. It was all dial-up, the posts appeared much more slowly, and they lacked photos. One year we tracked the opening of the first daffodils as spring spread over the country. When a sudden spring snowstorm buried Atlanta, solicitous notes poured in to the Georgia gardeners from everywhere.

Garden author Allen Lacy was a member, sometimes trying out ideas that would later appear in one of his books, and there were professional horticulturalists and scientists. The discussions could get pretty heated! Many of the posts were sub-basic questions from people who could have found the answer in two seconds, but would rather ask a stranger than open a book. That part never changes, does it?

We mailed seedlings and iris divisions to each other, and the east coast members of the group met, and even toured together – I think one group went to Wave Hill in NY, and another group traveled to Nancy Goodwin’s beloved, long-gone Montrose Nursery and to the NC Botanic Gardens in Raleigh. JC Raulston himself was still alive back then, experimenting like mad!

And we were all quite concerned about the Michaelangelo virus, due March 6, 1992.

Annie

Thank you for your kind words. If you get a chance, pick up the October issue of Horticulture with the More for the Northeast supplement. I wrote up Ithaca for the “On the Road” segment. Too bad I didn’t have the opportunity to pick your brain before I wrote it.

Of the people I know that are aware that I have a blog, I don’t think too many read it. So my personal experience is that gardeners aren’t very interested in what goes on in “Computerland,” and the statistics Doug quotes confirm my suspicions.

Doug Green has a much more universal perspective. I admit–I don’t hang around at the usual gardening venues of plant societies and garden clubs. So I don’t have a good idea of what the majority of gardeners are really like.

I would also mention that I am a member of a couple of local gardening clubs. Within those groups there are people of all ages, but I guess older women are certainly over-represented.

Most of them use email and use the internet to search for things nowadays. But only a few have ever visited my blog and even those probably only looked at it once and none of them commented online, although in person they did make comments to me. I don’t know if any conclusions could be drawn from that.

There are still major greenhouse operations that do not even have dedicated fax lines and are not computerized – never mind email and blogs.

Are gardeners similarly inclined to be technologically behind the times?

Absolutely.

I run an Internet publishing business and the “problems” I wind up solving for customers such as “I ordered your ebook – it hasn’t come in the mail yet” (meaning snail mail) are constant.

Are these folks bloggers ? No. Those that blog are among the technologically aware and those that actually read blogs are tech savvy compared to the mass of gardeners.

I won’t even hazard a guess why this is so but comparing blog numbers tells one part of the tale.

AngryChicken – one of the bloggie award nominees about crafting has an Alexa ranking of 501,998. This is it’s ranking as the most visited site on the Internet.

GardenRant scores 978,940 – a fair way back. Cold Climate Gardening scores 1,149,141. Zanthan scores 1,171.208,
GreenZoo doesn’t rank,
GardenSpot is the 4,495,354 most visited site on the net,
Welchwrite comes in at 1,083,463
Garden Djinn ranks 4,420,735.

Unfortunately, those hosting on blogger can not be ranked at this time at Alexa – this varies with the day.

So in terms of Internet popularity at least as measured by one craft site up for an award and those blogs listed here plus Garden Rant – we don’t have the same amount of traffic or interest on the Net. This of course makes the assumption that these blogs are the most visited garden blogs and that angry chicken is one of the most visited of craft sites – both assumptions that may not be true.

But still food for thought.

Doug