Candlelight Vigils Commemorate Blog Anniversary

Garden blog fans in Greensboro light candles to celebrate the first anniversary of Leave Me Alone, I'm Digging.

Ok. Not really. But I wanted to use this photo of Christmas Eve at my church, and today is the first anniversary of my blog.

The blog began as a simple solution to a problem. I like to jam lots of plants into my flower beds, and I do a lot of planting in fall and winter when many of my perennials are dormant, and so I was always digging them up accidentally. I figured that a blog would be a handy way to keep my garden photos, along with notes to myself like, "Don't plant anything in the left corner, you idiot, 'cause that's where the hostas are."

Having a designated place to write about my garden motivated me to start noticing things, and to keep an eye out for things to write about. I found that my garden was much more than a simple suburban backyard; it was the scene of a vicious (and still unsolved) murder, and the habitat of gnomes. The blog became a combination tabloid, scientific journal, and a place to confess my own crimes and misdeeds. I complained about the drought a lot, documented the childhood and adolescence of a baby bluebird (if I could raise a child and get him out of the house in three weeks, maybe I'd be more keen on having one), and wrote a poem. I diagnosed my mental illness (one of them anyway), and gleaned some wisdom about plants from my redneck alter-ego, Bobby Earl.

What's really been fun, though, is "meeting" so many people who are warped in the same way I am. People who steal leaves from their neighbors' curbs, who plant stuff in freezing rain, who collect hoes, who camp out by the window waiting for that bird to come around from the other side of the tree, who know the words to all the good cry-in-your beer songs, who can't sleep if they accidentally kill a rabbit, who have plant tags stashed everywhere, who dream of replacing their entire lawn with flowerbeds (and the people who actually do it), who think there's something sick about the "Grow to the size of your fishtank" ethos that defines American culture, and people who buy the last scrawny plant on the sale table because they worry that no one else will take it home if they don't. People like you.

Thank you for reading my blog. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Now, if I could just remember where I planted those hostas...