Potted and Pruned: Living a Gardening Life

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(FreeImages.com/Mats Heyman)

When I read Carol Michel’s book, Potted and Pruned: Living a Gardening Life, I was reminded of a spring evening several years ago. As I walked towards my back door after a marathon day in the garden, I overheard my kids talking about me. They’d been waiting for me to finish gardening so we could eat dinner together.

“She said she’d be in an hour ago,” said my son, Jeremy. “I knew this was going to happen,” my daughter, Sabrina, replied. “She always does this when she’s in the garden. I’ll be there in a minute really means I’ll be there in an hour.” “You guys haven’t learned yet?” replied Jeremy’s twin brother, Danny. “I had a snack.” At that point, I walked in and thanked them for taking dinner out of the oven a few minutes earlier. (Okay, full disclosure. They’d taken the dinner out an hour before. It was night, not evening, and the dinner was cold and had to be reheated.)
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The 36 chapters, many of them tongue-in-cheek, can’t help but make you smile, if you’re a gardener. And if you’re not a gardener, her book is sure to enlighten you. Michel was inspired to write the book based on reactions to her long-standing garden blog, May Dreams Gardens. “I found that many readers responded positively to my humorous, light-hearted approach to gardening,” says Michel. For the format of the book, Michel was inspired by all the old gardening books she has, including some from the early 20th century. “Those books tell about gardening in words, with few pictures. The title of the book, Potted and Pruned, refers to how I took some of the best posts from my blog, potted them up, pruned them a bit, and published them in the book.” Michel’s chapter, “Rare in Cultivation,” taps into the gardener’s true nature. As she notes, “If you want to entice a gardener to buy a plant practically sight unseen, just mention it is ‘rare in cultivation.’ Those three words will cause any gardener’s heart to skip a beat… Before they know what plant it is, they are deciding where to plant it, though they don’t know yet if it is a tree, a shrub, a vegetable, or a flower…” Another one of my favorite chapters is “GADS.” This stands for Garden Attention Distraction Syndrome. Apparently, it’s a common affliction amongst gardeners. That made me feel better, because I know I have it. It’s a disorder that has you jumping from one gardening task to the next with what appears to be no order, yet you do get quite a bit done in the process. Each standalone chapter is short enough to be read on its own, or you could sit down and read several chapters at once, in the same amount of time it would take you to plant a flower bed. As long as GADS doesn’t get in the way, or that weed, or that plant you know nothing about, but you just have to have. Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, The American Gardener, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of 10 books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story Series, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com. Her backyard is a Certified Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.
Michel does a brilliant job of capturing such fun facts about gardeners–including their warped sense of time in the garden–in her book of gardening essays. I chuckled when I read her chapter “Time in a Garden.” She begins the chapter with these wise words. “It is true what the philosophers tell us: Time does stand still in a garden. This fact alone shapes how gardeners define time and their definitions are quite different than those used by people outside of the garden… We know from observation that total elapsed time for just a minute in a garden is often as long as 30 minutes outside of the garden.”  
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Date: FEBRUARY 28, 2018
© Julie Bawden-Davis