Blue Planet Garden Blog

Learning to Love You More

Two and a half years ago, I started blogging on a whim.  Unlike many of the garden blogs I visit, I don’t chronicle what I’m doing in my own garden, although I do drop in on it occasionally.  I write about design, though not with the single minded focus of some of my colleagues.  Sustainability is often a topic, but I don’t like preaching, even when I’m the one doing it, so as a steady diet, it doesn’t work for me. I share what I see on my travels, but since I rarely go anywhere, travel doesn’t even warrant its own category.

As long as it connects to gardening or design, even in the silliest or most tenuous of ways, I’ve considered it fair game for a blog post, so I can’t complain that I’ve hemmed myself in.  Despite this, I’m finding it harder and harder to come up with topics that are both interesting to me, and potentially entertaining or informative for others to read.  My post frequency, always a bit random, has become even more unpredictable. And I can’t blame it all on writing a book, since my co-author Rebecca continues to cheerfully post once or twice a week on her own blog, while simultaneously writing a gardening column for Horticulture AND blogging for Fiskars.  (Random thought: Some days, I don’t like Rebecca.) Lately I’ve been considering my options, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

There’s more to life than gardening

Recently, friend and fellow Lawn Reformer Susan Harris told me she was burned out on a daily diet of garden blogging.  Four years after beginning Gardenrant and her own Sustainable Gardening blog, she’s not tired of gardening, but she wants to write about other things.  Last month she started a new blog called Boomer Turn-Ons, and is having a fabulous time covering entertainment, music, health and fitness – basically, any topic that catches her eye as seen through the lens of where she is in her life today.  I’m loving her blog – which actually ticks me off slightly as I am old enough to be a boomer only if the most liberal definition is applied.  But even though she’s expanded beyond gardening, she still has a theme to tie it all together.  Somehow, “stuff Susan Morrison is thinking about today” doesn’t quite cut it.

Get Serious

I participate in a garden writer’s forum on Facebook, and it’s made me realize how lackadaisical I am in my approach to blogging.  Not only have I never maintained an editorial calendar for my blog, I had to Google the term to figure out what the heck one was when several writers in the forum were comparing notes on the best way to manage one.  They also apparently have so many awesome ideas to keep track of that lots of them do something called mind mapping AND they’re always furiously debating the future of publishing in an informed and passionate manner.  While my mind is not currently generating enough incredible ideas that a map is required, I have created my first-ever editorial calendar. (Although this post isn’t on it, so I’m not off to a great start.)

Learning to Love you More

My conclusion: I still want to write about gardening, but need to “look outside the garden” to reignite my creativity.  From an article in a recent creativity-themed O Magazine, I learned about the now defunct website Learning to Love You More, which posted various creative assignments (such as draw a constellation from someone’s freckles).  The responses were later turned into a book and are archived in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.  The article invited readers to participate in a series of “un-quizzes”, ranging from making a 30 second video of yourself doing something backwards to drawing a picture of the hair of anyone who stirred you up emotionally in the past year.  I’ve opted for un-quiz #3 – take a family portrait under the table. This is what Nick and I looked like after a slightly muddy, post-hike lunch this past Sunday.

Do I feel more creative?  I'm not sure.  But armed with my editorial calendar and a  commitment to regular un-quizzes, I’m hoping to re-energize my blogging.  For those of you who have been blogging for a long time, many of you with much greater frequency than me, I’d love to hear your secrets.

Book Review: Energy-Wise Landscape Design

 

If you read my blog regularly, you know I rarely do book reviews (although that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t review my book when it’s out in three weeks).  When I was given a copy of Sue Reed’s Energy-Wise Landscape Design: A New Approach for Your Home and Garden, however, I couldn't resist the chance to dig into a book I’d heard so much about.

An excerpt from the introduction says it all: This book shows how we can all save energy, simply by making small changes in the way we design and build our landscapes.  Reed includes strategies for conserving both operating energy (the energy used in our day to day functioning such as fuel for lawnmowers) and embedded energy (the energy used to manufacture and transport equipment and services, such as the cost to manufacture concrete).  During my Bay Friendly Qualified Design Professional training last year, for the first time I truly grasped the shocking cost of transporting potable water into a home, the majority of which gets flushed down a toilet or poured into the landscape, so I was pleased to see the inclusion of embedded energy, as it something most of us don’t even consider.

The first part of the book  focuses on design, the second section explains how to build and care for landscapes in an energy-efficient manner and the third and fourth sections cover ideas for generating energy and lighting strategies.  Information is presented in a way that is neither preachy not condescending and the tone througout is friendly and non-judgmental.

Some information presented here was a more in-depth review of things I already knew (for example, that trees cool down a garden not only by providing shade but through the process of transpiration), but even then, the level of detail provided helped me understand the concepts much more thoroughly.   By far the most useful portion to me are the early chapters focused on landscape design.  This book goes well beyond traditional advice such as placing deciduous trees at the Southwest corner of the home.  It provides suggestions on what to plant (and what not to plant) for all sides of a home, the pros and cons of different hardscape options and strategies for keeping the ground cool.  Here in California, we’re more interested in fending off the heat than in capturing the sun in winter, but Reed does a good job outlining some of the trade-offs you make between heating and cooling your home if you live in a climate with more extreme weather variations.  Detailed information on how the sun's angle of incidence affects temperature at different points in the day, the amount of shade cast by plants and options for creating windbreaks are all included.

If you’re a garden designer, Energy-Wise Landscape Design is a must have for your bookshelf.  Not only will it improve your ability to design sustainable landscapes, but many of the chapters clearly express concepts I’ve struggled to communicate to my clients.  This book will help me better explain how a sustainable design approach benefits both a homeowner and the environment.

Likewise, serious gardeners will appreciate the many practical tips, including Reed’s realization that most of us are not going to redesign our gardens from scratch.  As such, she offers numerous tips for working with less than ideal existing site conditions.

One caveat:  this is a hardcore book with very few pictures, and those are in black and white.  Although Reed attempts to demystify the principles of energy-wise landscaping, many of the concepts are complex.  For me, the book felt more like an entertaining text book (similar to Residential Landscape Architecture) than a garden book I would pick up purely for entertainment and inspiration. 

If you’re serious about living a more sustainable, energy-efficient lifestyle, you can’t go wrong with Energy-Wise Landscape Design.  To learn more, visit the book's website.

Garden Up! Vertical Gardening Book Gets Its Own Page

The launch of Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces is just around the corner.  And these days, every self-respecting book has to have its own page, right?  My new joint website with Rebecca Sweet includes:

A media page showing upcoming appearances in print, on the air, and online

An events page letting you know where we’ll be speaking (next up, Northwest Flower and Garden Show)

A mini design portfolio (we ARE still designers, you know)

My favorite part: a ‘Look Inside’ slide show.

Once we actually HAVE some reviews, you’ll be able to see those as well.  And if you're interested in doing a review or or a book announcement on your blog, newsletter or magazine, there’s also a link to our Flickr site, with easily downloadable photos as well as book and author overviews.

But wait, there’s more!  The official release date of the book is February 22 and it can be pre-ordered anytime, but expect it to take a little longer to actually ship.  Inspired by the Superbowl, which practically invented the idea of the pre-party (not to mention the pre-pre-party), think of this announcement as a warm-up.  Soon I’ll be sharing details of our Cyber Book Party, complete with door prizes and party favors, natch.

See you at the party!

Susan