Gardens Bloom on the Net

For many gardeners, the internet provides a wealth of information on plants, landscaping and garden accessories. A recent query on Google brought up a staggering listing of 5,920,000 sites. Posted by professionals and amateurs alike, garden blogs are clearly a popular way for gardeners to exchange information and share their delight in gardening. This blog is no exception so here's a shot of paper-whites on a window ledge overlooking a snowy deck in January. Read on for more about blogs.

One of the most informative websites is davesgarden.com, which provides a weekly newsletter filled with a wealth of information submitted by subscribers from across North America. There are individual sections like plantfiles, birdfiles and bugfiles, and lots of other gardening-related topics, all beautifully illustrated. One frequent contributor is Todd Boland, a reserch horticulturist from Newfoundland.

Canadian garden blogs - (17,100,000) sites according to Google). Among the many we clicked on, we found some to be unabashedly commercial, a few that seem to be written by poets, and others that provide very practical tips on gardening issues. Some of the sites we looked at included canadiangardening.com (produced by the magazine of the same name), heavypetal.ca (an urban organic outlook from a west coast writer), douggreensgarden.com (an Ontario gardener's perspective) and bloomingwriter (Nova Scotia's own Jodi deLong). Checking garden websites is similar to our penchant for perusing seed catalogues at this time of year, as a way to overcome the non-gardening days of winter.

Many bloggers in the USA now participate in Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. The concept is simple: gardeners take photos in their own gardens on the 15th of every month, then post them on their blogs and also submit them to the "Bloom Day" site, with the result that viewers can see a wide variety of botanicals, as they appear across the continent, on that specific date. Of course, in the dead of winter, some gardeners resort to posting shots of their indoor plants. To see the photos and read the commentaries, go to: http://www.blogged.com/topics/garden-bloggers-bloom-day/

In a nod to Bloom Day, we're posting the following shots of two poinsettias. The first is a plant that was purchased during a fund-raiser for the Chester Playhouse in 2008. It was "summered over" outdoors that year and rewarded its owner by regaining its coloured bracts in the fall of 2009.

The second is a plant purchased in support of the theatre in 2009 and is, of course, much fuller and showier because it is in its first year.

This branch of a holly bush was peeping though the snow on January 3, 2010.

If you're taking photos during the winter, why not send us your own Bloom Day photos and we'll post them on this blog, along with some other suggested sites for your viewing.

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