Here’s the story of someone who discovered a garden that so excited her that she instantly caught the gardening bug and determined to transform her own little patch of earth. It all started when this gardenless homeowner went on a local house and garden tour and discovered this enchanting garden, shown here and previously on Takoma Gardener coz it’s one of my favorites, too. And best of all, in talking to the gardener/owners, she learned that they did it all themselves, without a designer. So suddenly this kind of beauty became attainable on her budget and she could imagine herself creating a wonderful garden herself someday. Actually not someday – now.
Next, in a passionate quest to see the garden again, she looked for photogr
aphs of it on line; after all, these days we expect to find everything on line and most of the time, we do. Her search ended on the Takoma Hort Club’s websites, where she found photos of not only this garden but my own, and the offer of my services as a gardening coach for beginners. She immediately emailed for help.
Now construction is about to commence on her home but no, she doesn’t want to wait till fall to start; if we start now she can plan and visualize and fantacize all summer and not waste a minute!
So the work begins soon. I’ll visit her site – can’t call it a garden yet – and maybe she’ll stop by my garden to see some of the plants I’ll be suggesting. I’ll urge her to start leafing through garden magazines, watching HGTV, and going on every garden tour in the D.C. area. But now that she’s felt the first stirrings of garden fever, she’ll probably never be the same. Readers, our church has a new convert.
[Photos: Garden of Dave Roeder and Joe Buriel in Hyattsville, MD. That's the town that was recently maligned by the writers of ABC's now-defunct "Commander-in-Chief"in a recent episode. Hyattsville was mentioned, oh, 2 dozen times, as crime-ridden and on the verge of race riots. As much as I loved seeing Geena Davis play the POTUS, good acting couldn't compensate for lousy - and badly researched! - writing. It just made me anticipate missing "West Wing" even more.]
Finally, there’s a place to go for information about what a "gardening coach" could possibly be or do – or charge, for that matter. And for a little background, it all started in the fall of 2004 when a Hort Club member asked me if I knew anyone she could pay to teach her to garden, at which I immodestly offered my own services. We accomplished a lot in her garden, she recommended me to others, and a little business was started – well, business cards were printed and an ad placed in the local paper.
With the ad came 19 new clients in 2005, people who needed help with tasks like determining weeds from keepers, learning to prune, creating borders, deciding what project to start with, and making their gardens easier to maintain, to name a few. Considering that the work is seasonal and almost always on weekends (in order to work with the clients while they’re home), I’ve concluded that coaching will never be a primary source of income, but it offers other rewards besides monetary ones, like increased credibility, opportunities for my own learning, and the immense satisfaction of helping to create gardeners. But then again, with my new website, who knows how many more calls I’ll get. It takes a lot more, I think, for people to see an ad and place that first phone call – what the heck do you do? – than simply reading a website.
So what’s new this year? Some new clients, including Kay and Kelsey, the owners of the garden pictured here. Now you’re thinking, why on earth would the people who created that vision of loveliness need a coach? Which was exactly my thought when I arrived to discover one of the most beautiful gardens I’d ever seen. But in fact, it was so close to perfect that its few trouble spots and marginal plants were driving them crazy, so they decided to get input from someone else. (They’d seen my garden on a tour, so knew that my tastes were similar to their own.) And besides some pruning advice, the most important thing I think I did was to give them permission – actually, more of a declarative "do it" – to get rid of those marginal plants. You know the type – they’ve been there so long or they’re so large, we let them struggle on for years as we stiffle our displeasure over their very wrongness in the garden. But the next thing I heard from Kay, they were positively giddy about getting rid of their problems, being freed from their doubts and guilt, and researching some wonderful new replacements.
Finally, friends, check out the site and give me your feedback. But if you ever need to create a site of your own, don’t do what I did and use one of Register.com’s templates. Imagine this example of truly horrible programming: you can’t bold, italicize or underline a word or two; the entire paragraph has to look the same. Other examples abound. The two other static sites I’ve created use templates found on Tripod, part of the portal Lycos, and are a pleasure to use. (See Takoma Garden and Takoma Hort.) Too bad most of their designs are circa 1965, which is why I went looking for another website vendor for the coaching site. And by the way, anybody can afford a website nowadays; these all cost about $95/year each, including domain name, server space, the program itself and human support. But can anybody recommend sources of other templates?
I was chatting with a landscape architect friend – you know, the ones who do lots of hardscape and make beaucoup bucks? He was complaining about his (rich) clients. Apparently they want perfection at all times. Echinaceas past their peak just won’t do. And roses can’t be the terrific new shrub roses; they have to be hybrid teas so they’ll produce good cut flowers. And they don’t notice much in the garden — except the imperfections. He said the garden is like a stage setting to them. Almost makes me feel sorry for rich people. Which makes me wildly appreciative of my coachees — that’s the word I prefer to "client." They’re aspiring do-it-yourselfers either because A, they can’t afford to have everything done for them, or B, they think they just might enjoy it– working with nature, having a creative outlet, getting exercise, etc. So they’re motivated and willing to work and they’ll get there – there being a garden that’s a big improvement over what they started with and that they’ll have created themselves, with the dirty fingernails to prove it. I’m grateful for the opportunity to guide them down that wonderful path.
This photo has nothing to do with the text but hey, the elephant ears are looking gorgeous and they won’t last much longer, so let’s enjoy ‘em.
Here’s the story of someone who discovered a garden that so excited her that she instantly caught the gardening bug and determined to transform her own little patch of earth. It all started when this gardenless homeowner went on a local house and garden tour and discovered this enchanting garden, shown here and previously on Takoma Gardener coz it’s one of my favorites, too. And best of all, in talking to the gardener/owners, she learned that they did it all themselves, without a designer. So suddenly this kind of beauty became attainable on her budget and she could imagine herself creating a wonderful garden herself someday. Actually not someday – now. 
aphs of it on line; after all, these days we expect to find everything on line and most of the time, we do. Her search ended on the Takoma Hort Club’s websites, where she found photos of not only this garden but my own, and the offer of my services as a gardening coach for beginners. She immediately emailed for help. 
