Before I was a gardener/florist, I was a photographer. It started as a hobby because I had toddlers who were my constant muses at home, and there was a time that I would write about them on a regular basis. Sharing photos of our time together on my website along with a few words about life at that moment.

The other day my oldest, who somehow has her driver’s license now, told me that when she’s bored at school she’ll sometimes pull up that old website and read those posts, and it makes her smile or laugh or cringe. My youngest told me she does the same and I was a little shocked, but then again googling your mom when you’re bored makes sense for their generation. Feeling grateful my digital footprint starts after college - adopting Facebook late had its perks.

Anyway, at the time I was mainly sharing those images to show others my heart and eye as a way to help people understand who I was as a photographer. And if I’m being honest, sometimes it felt like no one was reading or caring, so what was the point?

Turns out I’m now really grateful for that former self who chose to keep showing up in that way for a few years, as it’s now a time capsule of a chaotic but beautiful season of life we’ll never get back. A little walk down memory lane we can access from anywhere.

The reason I’m telling you all of this is because we just recently entered into a new chaotic season of life, having moved into our dream home and property after (sometimes impatiently) waiting for a decade for it to arrive. So now we’re balancing owning businesses while raising teenagers and a puppy and cats and growing gardens and renovating a 100+ year old house on our own.

This time around though, unlike when the girls were little and we were slightly more young and dumb, we’re now very aware of how fast time flies.

However, no matter how much we try to remember to soak it all in, these days can also feel like we’re just constantly checking off to do lists between homework and sporting events and a little bit of down time. Meaning I’ve been too tired to write it all down but going to bed worried we’re going to forget.

So today I’m taking the small step of creating a new kind of weekly practice: creating a journal, the gardening kind. The one where I bring you along to the outside of our home to mark all the changes being made as a way to share my garden knowledge/successes/failures/lessons all while making sure one day we can look back on this time and remember how far we’ve come.

It also seems appropriate that at the moment our 7 month old puppy is tugging at my legs begging to play as I write, not so different than all those years ago with two little girls always underfoot. I most likely won’t be sharing photos of the girls anymore because I can remember being a teenager and would have really hated my mom sharing too much about me online. But Duke will most likely be there because he’s the new garden sidekick.

So here goes, what may be the journey of a slightly boring list-like blog but a time capsule in the making.

This week in the gardens, Week 1, April 27-May 1:

It rained! After what feels like forever we got proper water and things are looking so much happier.

The new cutting garden outside of my backyard studio: this was just a big piece of ground in October before a friend tilled it up and moving as many of the pieces as we could from the old farm happened to make a quick set up. Function over form here.

I’m so excited to have gotten a few perennial vines in the ground within the cutting garden - and one in a refurbished vintage water cooler. Silver Lace Vine is said to be a prolific grower that’s hard to kill, so fingers crossed it fills the wonky cow panel fence soon. The dream is to one day make a walled garden with this exact same footprint, but for now there’s 482 more important things to invest time and money into. But until then, vines will hopefully do the trick.

But back to the water cooler, turns out that if you remove the spout, it’s a free draining plant pot with lots of room for roots to grow! Silver Lace Vine has the potential to become invasive, and because we will most likely be attempting to forever control the Wisteria that was allowed to go wild for the past 15 years and has literally taken over half our yard, I’m taking no chances.

This is all wisteria, and if you multiply this picture by 100 then you’ll get an idea of what we’re dealing with. I’m sure whoever planted this had the best of intentions but sheesh it’s a nightmare.

The peony garden that was a huge push to get into the ground this fall is shaping up nicely. Lots of weeds to keep under check for now because of the quick till/plant process, but nothing that we can’t handle. Thankfully the plants should do the job of suppressing them in a few years, and this week I planted a couple of boxwoods to start making a bit of a barrier around this garden. Slightly old school rectangular is what I’m going for here. Much different than my normal loose, rounded edge garden border style but one that’s meant to have straight lines for practical mowing reasons. Sometimes you have to choose function over form. The cat mint and asters I planted amongst the beds will hopefully soften it a bit.

*September 2025: an overgrown garden and little piles of bricks and stone*

Back to the cutting garden: tuberose, cosmos, gomphrena, celosia, nasturtium, borage, and strawberries are now filling the boxes that housed tulips not too long ago.

Until next week,

xxLindsey

p.s. if you’re curious to see some of the blog posts from my old website, here’s a couple of favorites

The very early days

When weekly posts turned into a yearly wrap up

A week in the Garden, 4/27-5/1

Bulb Lasagnas