The Death Of The Garden Journal.

The garden journal is dead. It passed away today surrounded by family and friends after I discovered a cool widget for blogs that is in beta that made me realize it has served it's purpose for many, many years but in this day and age there are far better mediums for recording information.

Blogs are a wonderful tool. Not only can you jot down your thoughts and upload pictures or link to videos but you get to communicate with people all over the world about your passion. People in remote corners of the world can see what is blooming in your garden and you can see what's going on in theirs'. Since Feedburner started giving out site statistics for free I've spent countless hours refreshing the dashboard and reading names from countries I couldn't even pronounce. It prompted me to add a new widget yesterday that records hits to this blog on a map.



Can your garden journal tell you who saw your garden while you weren't home? My blog can.

If you're here chances are that you came across this blog through GardenVoices and you and I don't know each other. But I can share photos and information with you. Can your garden journal do that? My blog can.

This blog has allowed me to "meet" a lot of really interesting people who I wouldn't have had the pleasure of meeting otherwise. One person in particular (yes, you Planty) is in California and one day he stumbled across this blog and started leaving comments-the comments lead to him offering me some Cacti because of the images I posted of mine. The Cacti were being neglected and instead of them dying he offered them to me. Can your garden journal do that? My blog can.

Say you're in your garden tending to something and you decide to note the day your Daylilies started blooming. In the time that it would take you to go inside and find a pen you could have e-mailed your blog from your cell phone with the note and in an instant all of your Daylily-loving friends would know. Can your garden journal do that? My blog can.

The other day I was reading a thread on GW of a gardener who had her garden rejected from a garden tour and this person felt that it had been rejected because it wasn't in a posh area of her town. The respondents encouraged this gardener to post photos in the forum so they could have a "virtual garden tour." Imagine hosting your own tour- without all of the politicking that goes on in garden tours. You could pull out your cell phone or video camera and record a stroll through your garden and upload it to a service like YouTube and have your own garden tour on a blog where all of your friends could see it. Can your garden journal do that? My blog can.

Here's the widget I came across today that prompted this entry. It's called Dandelife and it's being developed so that people can share "time lines" of their lives on things like blogs or social networking sites. The name and logo immediately made me think of gardening and I wondered if it could be used in someway that's gardening related. I signed up and played around with it and I started to make a "garden journal" with the thing. If I wanted to I could add pictures and videos to it to help illustrate things better. See this for a better example of what it could look like when it's fleshed out. When I was signing up to test it I used "my garden" as my first and last name so that the title would read "My Garden's Life" instead of my name and I could stick that widget on the side of my blog and when people come here they could what happened in the past in my garden and what's happening now. Since it's in beta that service has some kinks to work out but with some improvements you could use something like that to record what's going on in your garden and share it with the world or just your close friends.

With advances like this in technology I don't really see a need for a garden journal made from paper. What's the point of recording all of that information in a little book when you could be recording it to the internet and sharing it with the world? If every gardener that came before us had kept what he/she learned in a little book on a shelf collecting dust where would we be?

The garden journal is dead.