Cold Climate Gardening

Colleen of In the Garden Online is starting the Mouse and Trowel Awards, a program “to give recognition to those bloggers, website owners, and retail outlets that add vibrancy, convenience, or pure eye candy to our world.” Nominations are currently being accepted. Finalists will be announced on April 13th, and winners announced on May 13th.

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Some photos are more interesting when cropped severely

So many people expressed admiration for the header images that I decided to put them in the Cold Climate Gardening Flickr pool. You can view them here. It is a challenge to find images that are still interesting once you cut them down to 780×140 pixels. On the other hand, some photos are more interesting when cropped severely. I think I’m getting better at finding those.

Speaking strictly as a totally biased mother, I think there are some pretty talented photographers in my family. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a high-resolution digital camera, and the willingness to go tromping in all sorts of weather. Many thanks to all my …

Popularity: 22% [?]

Boredom isn’t enough to motivate me to redecorate my walls or my website

“Why are you changing your design?” some of my children asked, as I was making preparations for the Big Day. I could have said, for the same reason many people re-paint their walls or buy a new dress: tired of the same old thing. But frankly, that doesn’t motivate me to redecorate my home or update my wardrobe. For me, increasing efficiency and usability was a far tastier “carrot” to compensate for the “stick” of a website overhaul.

My old design (or theme, as it’s called in WordPress circles) looked great, but wasn’t created with the most efficient code even at the time, and being old, couldn’t take advantage of the latest features of the WordPress software. Even worse, with certain operating systems running certain browsers (most notably Windows 2000 running IE), a lot of the type in the old design was so tiny it was illegible. Not good.

So late last fall I went theme shopping.

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Horticulture Magazine has jumped on the blogging bandwagon. Managing Editor Meghan Lynch and Executive Editor Sara Begg are both giving it a whirl. At the moment, though, you can’t get to them from the website’s main page. How dumb is that? The only reason I even found them is because I subscribe to the email newsletter. Since they’re just getting started, I expect a link will be up there shortly.

You might say Meghan discovered me. She (anonymously) wrote a sidebar praising this blog in the spring of 2005, and offered me the chance to write the book reviews for the April 2006. …

Popularity: 12% [?]

Many of you know I keep a listing of garden blogs on this site. For some of you, it was how you found me. It’s an indication of how our little corner of the blogging world has grown that two more blog directories specifically devoted to gardening blogs have shown up.

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We perceive something to be technology only when it is still new and, like most new things, not quite working the way it’s supposed to. Nobody thinks that the wheel is technology, though it’s as important a piece of technology as humanity has ever invented. . . .

It is when people stop thinking of something as a piece of technology that the thing starts to have its biggest impact. Wheels, wells, books, spectacles were all once wonders of the world; now they are everywhere, and we can’t live without them. The internet hasn’t quite got to that point, but it is getting there.
from A bigger bang | Weekend | Guardian Unlimited

I am old enough to remember watching black-and-white television and playing music on a phonograph, when a map was something you unfolded from a glove compartment and searching was something you did with a flashlight, looking for socks under the bed. I feel like I stand over a gap, one foot planted on each side, and I’m always looking for ways to narrow that gap, to bring the two sides together. The older gardeners, the ones with the most experience and knowledge to share, often just don’t see the point of the internet and all that has become available through it. Yet I have read many garden blogs, written by gardeners of a certain age, who say, “I never dreamed how many friends I would make, and with people from all over the world.”

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Several weeks ago on Garden Rant there was a small storm of indignation regarding the attitude expressed at a garden writers convention that what bloggers write was free for the taking without attribution. Most bloggers are flattered to be quoted, but instances of entire posts being republished somewhere else without permission, or even acknowledgment, are becoming increasingly common.

Popularity: 10% [?]