Keeping a Garden Diary

Credit: iStock / spanishalex

Garden Diary

You don’t have to use a flower book marker for your garden diary, but it sure looks better when you do

Keep your garden on schedule with a diary that tracks successes, failures and blossoming ideas

The big question this time of year is: What’s the best way to remember the previous year in my garden – what worked and what didn’t?

Get yourself a garden diary and record the date of the first snowdrop or crocus, first deep inhalation of a sweet pea, last frost. By keeping notes, you can see just when your garden lacked pizzazz.

Tips for Your Diary

You might then want to consider what many garden designers use – prolonged bloomers like Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’, Geranium ‘Rozanne’, Aster frikartii ‘Monch’, Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’ and Gaura. Sweet-scented Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ flowers more than half the year, attracting beneficials.

Sedum ‘Matrona’ and ‘Autumn Joy’ are showy summer through fall, and winter if you leave seedheads for chickadees. Great roses are red flower carpet and Rosa mutabilis; plant Rosa glauca for foliage.

Originally published in BC Home & Garden magazine. For regular updates, subscribe to our free Home and Garden e-newsletters, or purchase a subscription to the magazine.