Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

A few weeks ago, one of the volunteers at the Teaching Garden said, "You really should put together the past ten years of gardening columns and make them into a book."

Well, been there, did that five years ago. Optimistically titled ‘The First Five Years’, the columns were arranged chronologically, with an extensive index and an introduction explaining how the whole column-writing thing got started.

I think there were half a dozen sets of pages printed and stapled together. Two were given to people who showed the slightest of interest; for awhile, I used the index of another copy to find previously written topics but where any of the books are now, I have no idea. When I need to find out what I’ve written in the past, I go to www.teachinggarden.org where all the columns are archived and key-word searchable.

Even with an extensive index, smooshing all the columns together in the order they were written doesn’t make for a very useful or readable reference book. Bits of information on one topic may be separated by years chronologically and each column tends to be of it’s time. Often an item’s content is tied to some then current event - column #90, written in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, is a case in point.

Although ten years of writing don’t amount to a book, what collectively the columns have established is a voice, a theme and a target audience. So, with that as a basis, I’ve decided to take the given advice, and have another go at legitimate authorship.

Before any author sets pen to paper, he needs to know to whom he is going to talk, about what, and how he is going to tell the story.

Somebody once said that when she read a column it was as if I was talking just to her. She said she could even hear my accent. So there is the voice and the style. It happens that I write the same way that I speak - or at least would speak if my brain ran ahead fast enough to stop me splitting infinitives - and with the expletives only thinly disguised.

In book reviews, I’ve not been above thrashing publishers for trying to get as large an audience as possible by writing down to the comprehension level of a not very bright ten-year-old. Dim ten-year-olds typically don’t garden nor do they buy books - if they did, they wouldn’t be so dim!

These columns have always been aimed at mature adults who have an interest in gardening and, in particular, at that sub-set of gardeners which has managed to retain at least some trace of the wonderful childhood curiosity that makes kids constantly ask ‘why?’.

Years of gardening experience and the size of someone’s garden are of little import. A Forsythia shrub needs to be pruned at the same time and the same way in a condo complex as in a hundred acre estate. And the only difference between a newbe and an oldbe is that one has been doing it wrong for much longer than the other. I remember one person saying that, when he first started gardening, had someone told him about adding sand instead of peat moss to a clay soil, it would have saved him thirty years of frustration.

While the existing columns may not be physically adaptable to book form, the content has demonstrably been sufficiently readable, interesting and sometimes provocative, to sustain bi-weekly publication for a decade. The columns have always gone where others fear to tread. Sex, religion and politics, not to mention history, geography, and mathematics, have all been thrown in by the handful like spices in a curry.

Gardening is an enormous subject and writers make judgements about what their readers already know. There is a common editorial assumption that everyone knows the difference between a spade and a shovel and what the two tools are used for - from personal observation, most gardeners do not know.
At the other extreme, gardeners are assumed to be frightened by anything remotely technical and to be far too stupid to be able to trace the outline of an oval flowerbed using a piece of string and a couple of big nails. Again from personal experience, if a gardener can’t understand how pure water gets to have a pH of 7 then the failure lays with the ability of the instructor not the intelligence of the instructed.

The working sub-title of this venture is ‘The Book of Gardening Stuff They Don’t Tell You in Gardening Books’ and the reason for writing this column is that I would like some input from my loyal and demented readers. What have you always wanted to know about gardening that you could never find in a gardening book?

As it takes at least four or five years to produce a book, nobody should be in breath-holding mode, but, if I get some good questions I’ll likely also wring columns out of them - assuming, of course, that I can find good answers. E-mail me at teachinggarden@rogers.com.