Welcome back. I hope you had a great holiday and were able to get in a solid break. Mine was very good, exceptional really. I tackled items on my to-do list, saw friends, cooked a few nice meals, read books, visited museums (The Textile Museum of Canada is amazing), laid about on the couch with my favourite person and our dog, worked on art projects… honestly, despite a few moments spent in panic contemplating my future, this was by far the best stay-at-home holiday, ever. I fully intended to keep working on the site, but as the days passed, I decided to take the break more fully and leave it until the new year.

2015 is opening in a big way. Maybe a little bit too big. As of next month I will have been publishing the You Grow Girl website for 15 years. 15 years! One decade plus five additional years. How did that happen? Back in November I started writing a long piece about how I got started. I’m trying to finish it for next month and am considering posting it here, but we’ll see how it goes. I don’t often know where I am going with a narrative until it is finished. It may be worth publishing or it could be full of boring anecdotes that go nowhere. Yesterday morning, I procrastinated beginning this, my annual looking back on the year post, by fussing about online, reading depressing articles about the bleak state of things for writers. What a great way to get going on the first day back to work at the start of a new year! In the midst of that, it suddenly occurred to me that my first book was published 10 years ago. A full decade has passed since I made the unexpected transition from graphic designer to writer. Until that moment I had no idea that so much time had passed and the realization hit me like a punch in the gut. There are a lot of milestones to take in right now and I have to admit that the whole thing has me feeling overwhelmed.

I started writing these end of year wrap-ups back in 2010 and have found them to be a helpful way to encourage an optimistic move forward. Perhaps the same will occur here, so here we go.

White Borage

Cholla skeletons that I collected together and photographed while staying in a cabin in the Mojave desert. (They went back where I found them.)

Year Start to End

The winter of 2013/14 was particularly rough and to top it off the start of the growing season came late. I lost several perennials that just didn’t make it through. Five months into 2014 my friend Barry (he of the most amazing garden) sold his house and moved out of Toronto. Between that and the lost plants, a pervasive theme of loss permeated the first 6 months.

On a positive note, a theme around messiness bled over from 2013 and I was surprised to find myself much more accepting (and even embracing) of my messiness as a gardener and a person. Out of acceptance came a new-found resilience and comfort with vulnerability.

By the summer I saw plants bounce back that I had been sure were lost. I was most happy to find my favourite climbing rose recover. At the start of the season only one tiny bit of it was still alive, but by the end it had grown back up to reach beyond the top of the shed it is planting against. It made only a few scraggly blooms, but I am hoping that this year it will come back as bloomtastic as ever. Fruiting trees and bushes flourished all summer long and I found myself going out on foraging from unpicked local trees whenever I had the chance. My black currant bush produced a record 9 pounds of fruit! I made more preserves this year than ever before. It was a good lesson in the balance of loss and gain in the garden. You win some, you lose some.

Yet again the garden provides lessons about life when I need them most.

• I started podcasting in 2014. I’m a visually oriented person. Sound is not my forte and educating myself in making a decent-sounding podcast on a budget posed some frustrating challenges. Still, I was proud of myself for pushing past it and publishing a few podcasts. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether or not I will continue podcasting in 2015. It’s a great deal of work and one that has already cost more than I can afford out of pocket. With no possibility for financing, I have resisted moving forward with new interviews and am considering shelving it for good. Thanks so much to everyone who trusted me enough to agree to be interviewed.

My garden in August 2014.

Favourite Story of 2014

2014 was a difficult year out in the world as well as in the garden, and it was events such as those that transpired in Ferguson that prompted me to write about the garden as a place of sanctuary and healing, gardening as an act of quiet rebellion, and a piece about some of my personal experiences with race.

Favourite Plant of the Year

I was rather excited about 2 dwarf ginkgo trees that I bought in the spring. Unfortunately, I only mentioned them in passing here, which seems to suggest that they were not much of a favourite, when in fact the sight of them each day brought endless joy. This year I will make an effort to correct this neglect… should they survive their first winter in pots in my shed!

Favourite Garden Visited

I had planned to visit Moorten Botanical Gardens in Palm Springs, but it was closed due to flooding the morning we were there. Beyond that I did not visit any new gardens in 2014! A first in many years.

Favourite Picture Posted in 2014

As always, I took lots of photos, but of those that I posted here, none stand out as a favourite. That said, there were lots of images that I took but did not post here that I am proud of so… I suppose I’ll have to skip this question for 2014 as it pertains to the website.

If you’re ever in the Joshua Tree area, you must visit the Noah Purifoy Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum.

More Highlights of 2014

• By far the greatest highlight of the year was our much-needed March trip to Joshua Tree and the Mojave desert. I am in love with that region and would go back in a heartbeat. Coming from a greener landscape, there was a part of me that I think expected the desert to be just that, The Desert. A single entity. A somewhat homogenous place of scarcity. In reality I found the landscapes in this small region alone are varied and lush in their own way. There is a fullness and diversity of life that is really quite wondrous. No place has made me more humbled and conscious of the insignificance of my existence, yet for some reason I long to spend more time exploring it.

• Davin and I launched You Grow Girl Makes, stitching and embroidery projects and patterns designed for gardeners and people who love plants. We will continue to create more of these projects in the coming year and I am also planning to teach more stitching workshops.

Grow Great Grub in original English, Croatian, German, and Portuguese.

• The website got a new look and some structural changes. I love the illustrations and hand drawn type that Davin created for me.
• My second book, Grow Great Grub, was translated into Portuguese.
• Circus Gardening.

• In 2014 I continued experiments in dyeing threads and fabric with plants gleaned from my own garden or beyond. I’ve found the process of dyeing and seeing what happens as fun and satisfying as using the dyed materials in my stitching projects. I intend to continue in 2015 and have already collected a few materials to dye with.

Looking Forward

This is a tricky one to answer. As a gardener, my plan going forward is more of where I was already headed. This means I want to keep pushing to make ample space for spontaneity, exploration, discovery, and messiness. I’ve been in this space a few years now, so I am very much looking forward to seeing how the garden fares now that some of the tougher perennials have become firmly established.

As I grow older I have found that my interest as a gardener has moved away from a focus on productivity towards something deeper and more personal. I have found myself feeling a greater sense of satisfaction around what the garden gives me, beyond food to eat and something pretty to look at. Here too have I found my attentions drifting as a garden writer. For this and other reasons I have been forced to slowly push my way through a mucky bog of fear and take more risks with my writing that I have been too afraid to move forward with in a public sense. In that regard I know that the coming year is less about changes in the garden and more about changes in my career as it relates to gardening. In a way I am excited, but I also feel weighted down by a lingering shadow of uncertainty. And with that I leave 2014 behind with this quote that is taped to the wall beside my desk:

“My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it—flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.” – May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude