Scavenger Hunt Winners

A big thank you to everyone who took the time to enter the Scavenger Hunt, which I organized to help celebrate the new design here at Cold Climate Gardening. I hope you all had fun as you hunted for the clues. The prizewinners have all been notified by email, so I’ll give the rest of you the answers to the hunt.

Search Box Snafu

I made sure that each clue could be found by using the Menu in the sidebar, though I was sure most hunters would resort to using a search engine or the search box in the sidebar. The search utility that comes with WordPress doesn’t search the static pages, which is where many of the answers were found, so I installed a plugin that searched pages as well. Much to my chagrin, I learned after the hunt was underway that it didn’t format the search results well, though it was still possible to get the answer that way. My apologies to all of you who had to puzzle this out.

The Answers

I tried to word the questions as carefully as I could, but in several instances one or more of you managed to supply a correct answer that wasn’t the answer I was expecting. That was a bonus for me!

1. What is the tagline of this website? I wanted one question to be so easy everyone would get it right. The tagline is at the top of every page: Hardy plants for hardy souls. When you live in a climate with a long winter, you do need a certain hardiness of spirit to persevere–or a second home in the south.

2. Name one US state that is *not* represented in my blog directory. About ten paragraphs down on the directory page you’ll find a listing of all the garden blogs by category. Most of you probably consulted an alphabetical listing of states, because the predominant answer was Hawaii, though any state not listed would have been counted as correct.

3. Type the url of the page on my site that has links to hardiness zones from both the US and other countries. I expected most people to list the url for the Cold Climate Online Information page, which list several links to hardiness zones. More than one person linked to this post, which I decided to allow, because the pdf that the post linked to displayed hardiness zones for Canada as well as the US. A few people gave an off-site link to hardiness zones, but I specifically said the url had to be from a page on my site, so those answers were disqualified.

4. Type the name of one contributor (author) to this site whose last name is *not* Purdy. The easiest way to get the information would be to choose About This Site on the menu, and then pick the Contributors sub-menu, but probably many of you figured out some other way, perhaps by looking through the Archives or the Essays.

5. Who called me “the able and wry goddess of Cold Climate Gardening”? Give the name of the person and the url of the website page where you found the quote. This was in the What Others Say section of About This Site, but one person actually found the quote on David Perry’s site. Since I had said the website page and not my website page, I decided that answer was correct, even though it wasn’t the one I was expecting.

6. Type the name of the author of “Seed Savor,” and provide the url of its page. Everyone wrote the correct answer, Chan Stroman, and I accepted the actual essay page or the Essays table of contents page, which also gave both the title and the author.

7. Type the name of a garden book author who lives in upstate NY, and provide the url of my website page that has that information. I expected everyone to pick an author from the Upstate NY Books page, but two of you found Donald Leopold in my blog posts and provided the url. Well, he does live in upstate NY, and you did provide a url from my website, so it was correct. As a matter of fact, I should add his books to that page.

8. Type the name of one of the garden blog pioneers interviewed in the series of the same name. No one seemed to have trouble with this, perhaps because it’s right there in the menu.

9. Give the name of a cottage garden open to the public, and the url of my website page that lists them. I was expecting you to name one of the gardens listed on the Cottage Gardening Gardens and Gardeners page, and most of you did. Once again, two people (and it’s not always the same two people finding the exceptions) listed Maine Cottage Gardens, which at the time was only listed in the Cold Climate section, but met all the criteria. I’ve now added it to the Cottage Gardening section as well.

10. Which tag, as reported in the archives, is most frequently used? I gave a pretty broad hint with this one, so once you located the Archives, it was easy to figure out that “Colchicums” was the most frequently used tag.

The Winners

• Pam Penick was the Grand Prize Winner. In addition to the Fiskars pruners, a copy of The Household Guide to Dying, and seeds from Botanical Interests and Renee’s Seeds, she picked Hardy Succulents and Indigo Dying as her other choices.
• Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!–Heather Tarvis
• Home Outside–Becca
• Wormwood–Colleen Vanderlinden
• The Household Guide to Dying–TC Conner, Cindy, Mr. McGregor’s Daughter, and Rachel Graham
• Fiskars PowerGear Pruners–Steve Kerwin
• Botanical Interests seeds–Mariah Kerwin
• Renee’s Seeds–Dee Nash

Thanks

Thank you, dear readers, for being such good sports, and a big thank you to the donors of the Scavenger Hunt prizes.