Lois de Vries' Garden Views

Secret #2: Reconnect to Your Inner Gardener I enjoy Garden Writers conferences. What's your favorite gardening thing? Do you feel like you’re going through the motions of gardening without getting much enjoyment? The sense of satisfaction we experience from gardening comes from within. Dissatisfaction is a symptom that we've become disconnected from our inner gardener. This discontent can arise from several sources. Someone or something outside ourselves can cause us to want to abandon our efforts. For example, if a garden club friend makes a critical remark about your painted flower pots that leads you to abandon what you had thought was a fun project, the enjoyment you derive from decorating flower pots could temporarily leak out of your life. The cure is to recall the pleasure you get from this activity and affirm that that is a good enough reason to continue doing it. Another kind of leak occurs when something that used to hold meaning for us no longer does, f

Secret #1: How to Generate That Magical Quality What's your ideal dream garden? Have you been to other people’s gardens that seem to have a magical quality to them, but can’t seem to create it in your own? What may be missing is you. The heady atmosphere we encounter in certain very special gardens is a direct expression of their gardeners' inner being. A fortunate few are able to garden this way subconsciously. The rest of us have to learn how to do it. And that's good news, because we can learn to paint our landscapes just as we learn to paint a picture. The tools we use are the myriad of greens and greys that nature supplies as a background, flowers that come in every color of the rainbow, and the bark, foliage, and natural features that add texture. But the ideas come from inside ourselves. The ethereal feelings, or atmospherics, manifest as we invest important parts of ourselves in the garden. We have to be willing to expend thought, energy, emotion, time, mo