Meeting New Garden Friends

It’s a beautiful fall day today…perfect gardening weather! Thank you for checking out the first edition of my blog “Garden Views.”  In this series dedicated to all-things-gardening, I want to share my views about gardening along with photos of my garden – my personal garden view. But this is your blog as well and I am eager to hear your views and enjoy photos of that special space outside your window.

Gardeners are amazing people, eager to share their advice and the bounty from their gardens. Who has not received a pretty bouquet of fresh-cut flowers or a basket of ripe tomatoes from a gardening friend? We can spend hours discussing (or arguing about) the best methods for pruning a rose, killing weeds or getting deer to leave our plants alone. There is so much to talk about.

Let me start by telling you a little about myself. I was born in Georgia but moved away as a child when my father had a job transfer. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and went back to Georgia after high school to attend the University of Georgia. Go Dawgs! No, I did not graduate with a degree in Horticulture but in History! Like many of you, I became captivated by gardening a little later in life.

I am married with two grown children – my son lives in Germany and my daughter in San Diego. We are 9 time zones apart and don’t get to be together very often. I spent 24 years living and working in beautiful San Diego where the locals claim it is “74 degrees and sunny” every day of the year. After we purchased a new home in San Diego with no landscaping, I got attacked by the gardening bug. I learned everything I could about gardening in the southwest as I created my new garden.

Five years ago, my husband and I moved back to Georgia and settled in Peachtree City. After all these years “away,” it felt like coming home. One of my first goals when I moved here was to learn about gardening in the south. I filled out the application to take the master gardener training through the Fayette County Extension Office. I was privileged to be accepted and completed my training in 2005 and continue to volunteer with the program. I am also a member of the Peachtree City Garden Club and write garden stories for the Fayette Woman magazine.

Like most of you, I still consider myself an amateur gardener. This blog is for everyone from the newbie gardener to those with professional degrees.  We can learn so much from each other. I hope you will use this blog as a forum to ask questions, share good tips as well as gardening mistakes, and encourage each other to get outside and plant something.

In the weeks ahead we’ll tackle different gardening topics but for now, send me your comments, ideas and a photo from your garden. Email them to features@fayettewoman.com. I would like to post a “garden of the week or month” so all of us can enjoy the beauty that Fayette gardeners are creating. Next week, I am taking a short trip to visit my son in Germany, and I hope to visit some public gardens in Germany and France that I will blog about in the weeks ahead.  That’s all for now. Happy Gardening!