Transatlantic Plantsman

Improvements to this blog…

As we approach the first anniversary of this blog at the end of this month, you may have noticed that I’ve made one or two changes – I hope you think they’re improvements.

I’ve made nearly 150 posts since my first at the end of November last year and I thought it would help if you could search them easily – so there’s now a search box, powered by Google, across at the top right hand corner. I’ve also added a box of Google ads across on the right. Ads for nurseries and other (more-or-less) horticultural companies will pop up and I hope you’ll find them useful (and if you click across to these advertisers and buy stuff it will also help defray the costs of running this blog). Because I posted recently about Nicki, one of our cats, you might find some pet-related ads over there!

I’ve also added some good blogs I've discovered recently and a pair of weather  boxes… down at the bottom on the right. There you can check out the weather from a weather station just a mile from us here in Pennsylvania, and also check out the weather in Peterborough across in the UK, just a few miles from our other base over in Northamptonshire. The US temperature is in Fahrenheit, as is still the custom, while the UK temperature is in Celsius.

I’m still looking at adding new features…

The picture? It’s just a lovely view this evening across the lake from our dock.

The Transatlantic Plantsman

As a garden writer, people often ask me how I find things to write about. Are they kidding? Just one look out of the window, even at the end of November, provides enough ideas to write about all day: the deer fence, the shining birch bark, the woodpecker, the last flowers of the season, making new raised beds, the foliage that still looks good after two nights of 20F/-6.5C.

But here, without the demands of an editor at a newspaper or a magazine, I can write about any plant that’s interesting, any book about plants, any way of using plants and that’s what I’ll be concentrating on – plants and books about plants.

I spend part of my time gardening in Northamptonshire in England (zone 8), about two hours north of London, and part of the time in Milford Pennsylvania (the much colder zone 5) about two hours north west of New York City. I’ll be writing from, and about, both countries – hence Transatlantic Plantsman.

Follow up: I'd intended to post here two or three times a week - but no sooner had I posted this introductory message - I mean just an hour or two later - than my computer had be sent off for repairs. So when I can get access to my wife's machine...