TW kind of made fun of me when she saw I was checking The Midwest Gardener’s Book of Lists out of the library. I shushed her and told her I’d explain later.
She made fun of me again when I picked it up to read, a couple of days ago.
I explained that the AWESOME Stacy Morrison is moving into a new house (which, TW knew) and said that Stacy saw this book and thought of me… because I am the queen of lists, at BlogHer.
It amused me. And, I thought it was interesting. Stacy bought (?) the version for her part of the world and I expect to hear awesome things about her gardening in the weeks/months/years ahead… (Also, go read her post: Eight Days ‘Til Takeoff.) I’m also kind of interested in getting the version for the region I’ll be living after we move away from this godforsaken place. Because, no — gardening isn’t really happening here.
We have my grafted gardenia. We have Elly’s lemon tree. We usually have a tomato plant in the spring, but so far none has shown up this year. Every now and then TW plants some other sort of vegetable in the porch’s built in containers. The yard has … stuff in it, that was here when we arrived. And, that’s all we’re doing.
So this book wasn’t super useful for me. It also became very clear that I know shit about gardening. The lists were fascinating (and you central Ohio people… how’s your deer problem? Seems like it was pretty bad when this book was written… almost an emergency situation or something. sheesh) but overwhelming. I needed more photos. A lot more photos. Or I needed the time and energy to look up every single thing on each of those lists because I literally could not picture about 90% of those plants/shrubs/treets/green things.
I know, I’m hopeless. Cool book, though.
Aha! That’s the pingback I haven’t looked into yet. (See also: I want to kill my buyers.) But yeah, that book is A-MA-ZING. I know/knew a lot of the plants, but the best part was the dozens, maybe hundreds, of plants that I didn’t know. And the categories: Old-fashioned shrubs, bulbs for fall and winter color, vines with variegated foilage, ornamental grasses for wet sites…. I mean, THAT is how a gardener thinks! Not, “Oh, I’d love to plant a peony here.” (Well, I think that, too, because peonies are the best.) I found another List Book for you this weekend. Almost bought it, figured you had to own it already and put it back, but then put it in my Amazon cart last night. You’ll see…..
Peonies always have ants.