Watching the garden grow
This 20-year-old image shows our garden as it was about 20-years ago. The below picture is updated to show how the garden has changed over the years.
Garden journal / photos combine to document your garden journey
Anyone who follows this gardening blog knows how important photography is to me and the content of this website.
Documenting the garden and its inhabitants – both the fauna and flora – is not only a favourite pastime, it’s an important resource for me from year to year to plan for next season and well into the future.
Remembering where the coneflowers or wild ginger were planted and when they bloomed previous years, or how the native wildflowers found a footing in the crevice on the large boulder, are just a few of the many benefits of documenting the garden through images and in written form.
The garden today with its black-eyed susans and native grasses and ferns dominating the back garden.
This is another view of the front garden as it is today showing a corner of the Japanese-inspired garden. The bench in the top image is replaced by yellow Adirondack chairs in front of a fern dominated garden.
Consider a garden journal
A garden journal like this elegant 5-year garden Journal (see image below) from YouTuber extraordinaire Linda Vater is an excellent way to document the garden from year to year. It also can make the perfect gift for the gardener in your life.
There is nothing like flipping through a well-worn garden journal filled with insights, drawings, tattered photographs and meticulous notes about the garden to inspire you either to get out in the garden come spring or dream and plan throughout the winter season.
Adding your own photographic images to the journal is an excellent way to enhance the journaling experience and work as a visual reminder not only from year to year, but decade to decade.
This elegant 5-year garden journal not only helps you record your garden journey, it’s a fine way to stay organized.
Even if you are not overly interested in extensive garden journaling, simplifying the process using only a photographic record to document your garden is both fun and rewarding.
Simply documenting the garden annually through photography and using inexpensive self-published books to create your own visual garden journal is a worthwhile endeavour. Or, you can create one larger book that includes a more long-term record of your changing gardens.
To read more about how easy creating your own photographic book is, check out my earlier post here.
The importance of documenting the garden over the years came into sharp focus over the past few weeks as I began scanning the thousands of slides and negatives I’ve accumulated over the past 45 years since first discovering the joy of photography.
Of course, documenting the garden’s growth took on a greater importance since I started this website, but even before the website I was using traditional analogue photography (prints and slides) to capture moments in the garden – from planting our first serviceberry tree to the changing face of our front and back gardens.
The images even show the history of the almost complete elimination of the massive lawns that carpeted almost every square inch of the property when we first moved in more than 25 years ago. Replaced, obviously, with a woodland-style garden.
Front garden transformation
The image at the top of the page illustrates how the front garden has changed in the past 20 years, going from a sunny garden with lots of flowers to a more shade garden using textures a subtle colour.
It shows a very different garden than our current front garden. For example, when I came across this image in my files, I barely remembered the drift of purple coneflowers and large grasses.
This image from about 20 years ago includes several areas of grass –long since gone – and an immature serviceberry tree on the left that is now quite large and shades out a large part of the existing garden.
The coneflowers died out many years ago, probably from the excessive shade that took over after the serviceberry pictured here staked off, grew into a mature understory tree. The grasses were removed after getting out of control and ferns have taken over the back area that once boasted a number of hosta and trilliums. There are still remnants of trilliums that emerge before the ferns take over that area of the garden.
Today our front garden is a combination of mature trees, ferns, grasses, a ground cover of pachysandra, creeping phlox and black-eyed susans. We’ve also added large boulders down the side of the driveway to hold back the garden.
This decision to use natural boulders as a retaining wall not only helped clean up a problem area in the garden, it gave us another micro-climate where we can use the heat generated from the boulders to grow rock-garden loving plants like thyme and allow the creeping phlox to drift over the rocks and cascade down between the crevices.
It also gave reptiles, such as our friendly garden snakes, toads and salamanders the perfect place to warm up in the early morning as the sun heats the rocks long before the surrounding area.
This image, taken at a local botanical garden, was the inspiration to plant Golden Alexandra or Basket of Gold in our own garden to cascade over the large boulders along the driveway much like the image below of the creeping phlox.
Last year, I added “Basket of Gold” (Aurinia saxatilis) to the area (see image above) and am looking forward to documenting its spreading growth over the seasons. (Beware: this plant is considered invasive in warmer climates). The idea came after visiting our local botanical gardens (see post here) where it lit up the rock garden in spring and early summmer. Once again, photographing the plant in the botanical garden gave me a visual reminder of how it was used, its growth pattern and its stunning beauty.
The garden in spring when the creeping phlox carpets the front in a sea of purple.
The top image and the more current photographs reminds me of how much the garden has changed in the past twenty years. Without the visual representation, these early memories of the garden would fade much like the flowers, grasses and trees that formed the early foundation of what is today.
This website’s focus is, of course, on woodland gardening with an emphasis on native plants and attracting wildlife. Documenting the garden and its inhabitants through photography is also an important part of the website. I try to provide helpful tips on everything from getting close to backyard birds, what cameras are best for garden photography and how to capture beautiful images of flowers and garden visitors.
Part of my focus on garden photography is using inexpensive, smaller digital cameras that are more than capable of creating stunning garden images, rather than spending huge amounts of money on the latest and greatest equipment. Many of these simple cameras are probably sitting in one of your drawers. If not, purchasing them on line for pennies on the dollar is not difficult. If you enjoy the experience, you can upgrade over time.
If you are interested in exploring garden photography further, please take a moment to check out my photography related posts on the website. Just go to my homepage, scroll to the bottom and you’ll be able to access those posts in the “photography related” links.
Going back into my photographic archives and scanning them into digital images has opened up a new appreciation for the importance of not only archiving our journeys in the garden, but our life’s journey with family and friends.
These are journeys that beg to be captured and archived, maybe on our smart phones, but even better on a dedicated camera designed to capture only our memories.
