A New Garden and a New Blog

A cottage garden (hopefully) grows in Brooklyn

A tangled mess of cosmos, snapdragons, cornflowers, and dara in the Portland garden

I used to have a fashion blog and gave it up almost ten years ago because the inspiration and fun weren’t really there any more. I still liked fashion (and blogging) but it didn’t have the same sort of excitement for me as it did when I’d started back in 2008, which felt very early-days-of-blogging though it really wasn’t. But there was a DIY spirit still, a sense of close-knit community that was never really the same after fashion blogging went big for a brief period of time around 2010 or so, and then went bust after Instagram almost killed it off.

When Anne Helen Petersen started her Substack offshoot Garden Study, she wondered why there weren’t more garden blogs out there, why there wasn’t a kind of Cup of Jo, but for Gardening? Garden instagram, however lovely it can be, is frustrating with its gorgeous photos and often short, vague captions. I’m always left wanting more. (What plant is that? And how is it grown?) I do love garden podcasts and Youtube channels—I’ll be posting about some favorites later on) but they’re still no real substitute for a lazy scroll through Google Reader with a cup of coffee. (Remember Google Reader!?)

For a good part of my fashion blogging years I loved it so much and felt so much excitement around the subject that if I tried to blog or look up fashion stuff too close to bedtime I wouldn’t be able to sleep. That’s how I feel about gardening now. I’ll talk about my gardening journey in a later post, but my husband Drew and I started vegetable gardening ten years ago in Nashville, and then moved to Portland, where I fell in love with growing flowers because growing flowers in the Pacific Northwest is magical. We built up a garden with six raised beds, which at first seemed like more space than we could ever fill up, but by the time we moved away we had two more flower beds cut into the lawn, and there probably would have been more if we’d stayed. I mean, I wanted to get rid of the lawn for good.

Last year we moved to the East Coast to be closer to family, and spent most of 2023 as nomads, living with family and in monthly rentals in the South. I wasn’t sure where we would end up or when we’d go there, but I couldn’t not garden, so every time we moved around I’d load up the car with portable pots of perennials and cut flowers I grew from seed under grow lights in an AirBnb kitchen in Greenville, South Carolina.

More Portland: a dahlia (Innocence, I think?) before it came down with a virus, and the old raspberries before we moved them to a less prominent spot

Now we’ve settled in Brooklyn, where we have an apartment with a little side terrace, and I’m already planning what I’ll be putting under the grow lights next month. It’s still a bit of a gamble. I’m not sure what the growing conditions will be up here (will it be too windy?) or if there will be enough light (skyscrapers keep going up around us!). But I’m aiming to keep growing what I grew in Portland, only in pots. Like last year, but hopefully a little more permanent. I want a tiny English cottage garden in Brooklyn. Roses and verbena and gaura and agastache and salvia and echinacea. Big pots full of dahlias, cosmos, zinnias, nicotiana, silene, and snapdragons. Mostly I’m excited about sweet peas—it was so hot in the South last year that I didn’t even try to grow them, but I think the climate here might work.

This won’t quite be a Cup of Jo of gardening. Maybe something more personal. More of a Liebemarlene Vintage of gardening, but with flower photos instead of outfit posts (thank goodness). I’ll share some of my garden inspirations, favorite books, favorite plants, podcasts. Gardens I’ve had and the garden-to-be. Right now it’s a mostly empty space with some potted perennials huddled together and a David Austin rose all wrapped up in burlap, but in a few months there will be color. And I’ve just planted the sweet pea seeds!

Until then I’ll be planning and blogging. I’m on Substack because it seems like the closest thing I can find to an old school blogging community—the subscription format is kind of like the old RSS feed? Anyhow it’s all free for now, and comments are open, too, so please do chime in, whether you’re, like me, a former fashion blogger converted to gardening, or whether you’re new to gardening, or an old pro.