Lois de Vries' Garden Views

My first post for Diggin' It , The Christian Science Monitor's garden blog, appeared at the beginning of February 2011, when I joined Judy Lowe's team of garden writers to share my knowledge about gardening in the stony clay of northwestern New Jersey and my thoughts about gardening from the inside out. It's been both challenging and fun to come up with topics during the dead of winter, when nothing much was happening in the garden beyond the slow crawl of our mini-glacier. There isn't any duplication of material between the blogs, so I invite Garden Views' readers to follow me on CSM, too. All of my Diggin' It posts are archived at http://bit.ly/hH2r8z . Despite its name, The Christian Science Monitor is not religious in nature, but rather a respected international newspaper that has won seven Pulitzer Prizes for national and international reporting. It was the first national daily newspaper to go Internet-only. Happy Easter!

It's hard to believe that the April issue of the Cultivating the Inner Gardener newsletter marks a full year of sharing my ideas about garden design with spirit in mind with my readers. I'd love for you to join these gardening enthusiasts and discover a new approach to your favorite pastime. Ground-breaking Ideas Each monthly issue offers subscribers innovative ideas about how to design a garden that is a sanctuary from the commotion of daily life. Together, we explore the rich potential of sounding our own depths to create gardening experiences that speak to the soul, as well as the practical matters of constructing our dream garden in the real world. Action Steps Action challenges for readers to work on during the coming month offer assignments for everyone who wants to get started right away. These run the gamut from summoning up childhood garden memories to designing the bones of your next garden project. All are intended to get you outdoors and reconnected to nature. Mo