What I wrote about in 2025 – on GardenRant and beyond!

Yep, I’m doing an end-of-year review of my GardenRant posts and other writings – my first. So why this year? Not because I need distraction from the news, although I sure do. But several things got me thinking about my output this year.

I was catching up with an old college friend, a journalist, and he asked me what I blog about here. I didn’t know how to sum it all up and resorted to calling out the titles of my most recent efforts.

Then I listened to a podcast from the Change Academy called 3-step suggestion for New Year’s Resolutions and the first step was to make a list the things you did in 2025 that you feel good about. “Rant posts” was the first thing I wrote. 

And that reminded me that it’s now 20 years since I started writing anything at all, besides short blurbs for a garden club newsletter.  My solo garden blog launched in 2005 and I helped create GardenRant the next year.

The clincher was realizing I may learn something from the search for patterns in the year’s output of 49 articles. And I did.

Eco-gardening: 12 posts

Of my 49 posts here, without a doubt my favorites to research and write were on eco-gardening topics. The research for them was SO interesting, and SO challenging to get right. That’s especially true when the topic is controversial and I’d rather not be hated on in comments. 

• Disappointment over the Pollinator Partnership Stewardship training  
• News of Roundup’s new ingredients
• The sustainability principle of using the things you have (in this case, keeping certain plants)
• Matrix v. massing in ecological design (and concluding that matrix design isn’t for DIYers)
• Criticism of the National Arboretum’s wild-type Friendship Garden 
• A garden center on challenges of selling native plants
• The USDA honeybee lab 
• Larry Weaner’s videos for Wild Ones
• Cues to care for front yards with no lawn
• A new native-plant garden succeeded quickly by hiring a professional
• What I do: leave insect damage but remove diseased plants
• Gardening for wildlife is way more complicated than we thought 

Plants – 4 posts

• My woody plants class at U.Maryland (in which actual horticulturists school me on the importance of plant ID classes)
• Jared Barnes’s bloom calendar idea
• Root-washing my pot-bound azaleas, with video (a precursor to plant death)
• My failures with ninebark shrubs

My gardens – 4 posts

I’m more of a garden person than a plant person, so it’s no wonder these articles about my personal garden and a public one that I’ve adopted were especially meaningful for me.

• Appreciating snow/ice photos
• It took 14 years to create this border I finally love  (a coming-out post after hiding my not-good-enough back garden photos for so long)
• An artist asks to paint my garden!
• Removing English ivy and beautifying my town center (with my garden club)

Other gardens/places – 5 posts

I had just a few chances to see other gardens in 2025, mostly in Seattle where my family held a reunion. But Annapolis is just a 45-minute drive for me and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum a 35-minute subway ride.

• Annapolis gardens on the Garden Conservancy tour 
• Smithsonian Air and Space’s new landscape
• See images of real lawnless front yards that actually look good
• People are going nuts over the beauty of lawnless front yards
• Seattle’s lawnless front gardens and its new Overlook Walk

People – 4 posts

I so enjoyed chatting with these people for blog posts that I’m inspired to chat up more people in ’26.

• US Botanic Garden’s orchid show and its designer (I’ve since learned that he’s a close neighbor of mine!) 
• Kellie Cox and her new garden center
• Meet 2 great in-person and online garden coaches
• The “Gardening Gays” of rural Virginia.

Reviews – 6 posts

Gardenblogging isn’t terribly lucrative, but occasionally I get to read and review books I wouldn’t otherwise see.  And the invitation to a film premiere at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African-American History and Culture was a BIG treat for me (despite the newly imposed press restrictions).  

• Meghan’s Netflix series has no gardens or gardening
• Review of “Garden to the Max” book
• Review of Pam Penick’s “Gardens of Texas”
• Smithsonian premiere of doc about Black poet/gardener 
• Praise for perennials in plantable pots
• Yards with no plants on CBS Sunday Morning

In the news – 5 posts

I couldn’t HELP but weigh in on the coverage of Trump’s changes to the White House gardens and grounds, especially since SO many sources – even experienced journalists – were getting it wrong. And always will, I guess.

• White House plant news in Oval Office and Rose Garden 
• How AI-generated gardens are impacting garden centers
• Responses to the paving over of the White House Rose Garden lawn
• Gardener fights authorities to keep sunflowers in his front yard
• What Trump has *really* changed in White House gardens (so far)

Somewhat off-topic – 9 posts

These posts have JUST enough of a garden handle to the story to qualify for this here gardenblog. 

• Scribehound, GardenRant and independent garden writing (including our deepest thoughts)
• Gardening and everything else on Reddit (and a thumb’s-up from me)
• How a 3-story addition impacts neighbor’s garden (and the whole neighborhood)
• Lucas, Willie and Micah Nelson’s perform song about building a garden  (and thoughts on “building” v. “creating”.)
• Buying orchids to reward my healthier habits 
• Alternative landscapes of documentary photography (images from the National Gallery of Art)
• Is Ruth Stout really a “backyard sex radical”? (that’s how the New  Yorker describes her in their profile)
• Gardening T-shirts seen online somewhere 
• The “Pluribus” Albuquerque landscape that isn’t real (the third Albuquerque-based show from Vince Gilligan)

Off GardenRant entirely

This isn’t my only blog. In 2012, thanks to what I’d learned from years of gardenblogging, I launched this nonprofit site about Greenbelt, Maryland, the town I’d just moved to. It’s one of three “garden city” towns built during FDR’s presidency. I’ve visited and written about one of the others (outside Cincinnati) but never the third in the trio – Greendale, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee.

Painted chimneys and Garden Walk poster seen in Greendale, WI. Photo credit: Photo credit: Mark Zalewski and the Greendale Historical Society.

So when I met a historic preservationist from Wisconsin who raved to me about Greendale, about which I knew nothing, I started a months-long project of researching and profiling it for local readers, and here’s my result – so far. I’m still looking for sources I can pummel with questions about yard and garden rules, so there may be a Rant post about that in my future.

Oh, and I discovered that there’s a Greendale GardenWalk! (Not to rival Buffalo’s but I’m sure it’s nice.) 

This last one has no gardenblog potential at all. It’s Hippies in Europe 1969, a memoir of the eight months my college boyfriend and I spent traveling and living in Europe that year.  We wrote it together over about six weeks, combining what’s left of our memories with our old photos and scrapbook items, and it was the most fun I’ve EVER had writing! By a LOT.  I loved reliving that memorable time (for us and in world events), and loved turning a very old romance into a present-day friendship, via email and text. Creating cartoons together, like this one illustrating a story we had no photos for, was a highlight.

After it was published online, some very nice people told us it should be a movie! So naturally I started dreaming of Meryl Streep playing me as the current-day narrator – a dream soon to be dashed after talking to my actual-screenwriter nephew, who very kindly suggested I get Meryl on board first. LOL.

This all reminds me how lucky I feel, especially as a retiree with some time on my hands, to have discovered writing back in 2005 through blogging. And I ALWAYS feel lucky to have found gardening several decades before that. Isn’t it just the very best “hobby” there is?!