I read Mrs. Greenthumbs' first book a few years ago, and I immediately felt a kinship with Cassandra Danz. Her obsession with gardening combined with her humorous disdain for the advice of the “gardening establishment” struck a chord with me. It's a viewpoint I try to keep in mind in any of the garden writing I do, whether it's the informal disarray of ideas here on my blog or more formal writing such as what I do over at About Organic Gardening. Mrs. Greenthumbs was the epitome of teaching while entertaining, obsessing while having fun. In that spirit, I offer you a few of my favorite lines from her second book, Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead, which I'm reading right now. Enjoy!

In explaining how to make a garden path:
“I know what you're thinking: Hey, wait a minute Cassandra, how can I take your advice seriously if you keep changing it out of laziness?'

My gardening advice is always serious, but, you may have noticed, is often inexact and approximate. There are a couple of reasons for this. In the first place, garden conditions are so variable around the country. that I can only really testify to what has worked for me. And second, I don't think gardening should be so difficult and precise that the average person will be discouraged.”

On garden ornaments:
“...if you insist on having a lot of kitschy garden ornaments, have a ton of them. Four ducks is tacky. Forty is an important collection.”

More on garden ornaments:
“A garden ornament is not supposed to serve the same function as the golden arches. It's not a display ad.”

On abundance in the garden:
“Look at the Sistine Chapel.....The Sistine Chapel is full of color and nude figures, two elements that are assets in a garden as well.”

On making an abundant garden:
“'Have a lot of money' is the subtext for most of the horticultural advice I read in gardening magazines.”

That's enough for now. I'm sure I'll have more for you as I read the rest of the book. She was awesome. Some of the other garden bloggers and I were discussing Mrs. Greenthumbs over on Plurk (you should join, you know!) and we decided she would have made an awesome garden blogger. As would the wonderful Elizabeth Lawrence.

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I love lilies. Hemerocallis or Lilium, daylily or lily---it doesn't matter. If there were a plant I could see myself collecting a bunch of, it would be lilies. Maybe when we have a bigger yard.

What I love is that I do absolutely nothing to my lilies or daylilies, and they provide my yard with these exuberant shows every single summer, and (purely by accident) I have some kind of lily blooming from late June through at least early September. I say purely by accident because it never occurred to me to actually plan any kind of bloom sequence. I fell in love with a good-looking photo in a catalog, or a particularly handsome specimen caught my eye at the nursery and whispered "take me home." And being weak, and a sucker for a pretty face, I obliged.

Right now, I have the old "common" orange daylilies that everyone and their grandmother seems to grow (but which I love with a passion bordering on worship anyway) as well as some orange and yellow lilies (didn't save the plant tags....) blooming in the front garden. The Madonna lilies are in full bud, and they'll be blooming just as the oranges and yellows are finishing up. After that, the drop-dead gorgeous 'Tom Pouce' lily in the back garden will be coming into bloom, along with several very pretty pink and peach daylilies that I got in one of those bulk packages of daylilies at Frank's before they closed down. (I loved Frank's. There is still nothing quite like it around here.) Most of these are rebloomers, and keep me happy with sporadic blooming through the rest of the season. In the front garden, after the Madonnas finish up, I have a few reblooming red daylilies that provide color even when August's heat and dryness make everything else look like hell.

Though, I wonder if that will happen this year. It's been raining for the past four days here. Not all day, of course, but decent showers a couple of times per day. Last year, I was complaining about what a dry, hot spring we were having, and this year it's raining so much that it's hard to manage getting a good lawn mowing in. I will not complain. It definitely beats dragging the hose around. And the vegetable garden is loving it!

How's your garden looking? And is there any one plant group that you find yourself buying, even though you tell yourself "I don't really need another one....."?

So, it's officially summer. I can't think of a more appropriate plant to feature today than coreopsis 'Early Sunrise.' It just screams "sunshine," doesn't it?

I have three large clumps of this in my front garden, and I absolutely love them. Of course, I love anything that grows as well as this plant does. My front garden is in full sun, and I rarely water it. All I have to do for these coreopsis to keep them blooming straight through until frost is deadhead it regularly. Be sure to leave a few blooms on the plant at the end of the season, though. You can save seed and sow more over the winter! It would probably self-sow as well, but since I mulch this bed heavily, I haven't had any volunteers show up yet.

Another thing I love about this plant is that it is one of the few perennials that grow easily from seed and bloom in their first year. I've started seed indoors under lights as well as by winter sowing, and both ways I've had very good germination. The first year, these plants don't look like much, but you will get a bloom or two. Starting in the second year, 'Early Sunrise' blooms profusely, carrying vibrant orange-yellow blossoms above dark green foliage. This is another one of those plants I should have recommended for new gardeners. See, I knew I would think of a few more

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Elementary teachers have an ingenious system for teaching a new skill. They start out the lesson by having their students do a task that it is practically impossible to fail at. It builds confidence, shows them that they know more than they think they do, and gives kids the confidence to try something a little different. For example, when teaching a child how to write the letter A, a teacher will spend the entire lesson one day just having the kids draw a series of diagonal lines, which are the major component of the letter. The next day, the lesson may consist of having the child trace a series of letter A's, and pointing out that the letter is made of the diagonal lines they worked on the previous day. The next day will have the kids tracing, and then doing five A's without tracing them. Before you know it, the kid is an A-writing master.

New gardeners need the same gentle introduction into the world of plants, I think. I believe, based on observation of my family and neighbors, as well as plenty of emails over the last few years, that most people never get into gardening because it just seems like too much work, and too much of a gamble on top of it. We all learn to accept the death of a plant eventually; it's part of being a gardener. But it is very disheartening when it's the first plant you try. Some people conclude, at this point, that they just don't have a "green thumb."

But there are plenty of plants out there that anyone can grow. If you're a Michigander, for example, I would recommend any of the following easy perennials:

--Daylilies
--Siberian iris
--Echinacea
--Rudbeckia
--Shasta daisies
--Switch grass (Panicum)
--Fountain grass (Pennisetum)
--Hardy geranium

I'm sure there are more, but these 8 are the ones that seem to just keep growing, no matter where they are planted or how badly they're neglected. The only negative about them, if you can call it that, is that if they're very, very happy where you've planted them, they'll take over in no time. If they're not especially happy, they'll still grow and bloom, just not as exuberantly as they do in ideal circumstances.

Are these sexy plants? Not necessarily. Everyone has seen them. These are the kind of "ordinary plants" (as Amy calls them) that form the backbone of my garden. I can rely on them to look good no matter how busy I get. Once new gardeners get a taste of success and the confidence that comes with it, maybe they'll feel up to tackling some of the sexier, more exciting plants. Or, at the very least, some that are a little pickier about their conditions than these ones are

What would you say? Which perennials would you absolutely recommend for a newbie gardener?

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"Profanity is the weapon of the witless." Anonymous

"If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there." Mark Twain

There has been a bit of discussion in the ol' garden blogosphere following my post about being a potty mouth garden blogger. Susan picked up on it over at Garden Rant and took full credit for the Rant's 4% rating. Then Doug Green picked up on it, and posted about how something like labeling oneself a potty-mouthed garden blogger can affect your "personal brand." If you haven't read his post, go check it out, as well as the comments. I'll wait.

Back? Okay, good.

Here's my thing. I was discussing this with another garden blogger via email. And what I keep returning to is that garden blogs are personal. At first glance, they're about the garden, but in all truthfulness they're really about the gardener. When we read May Dreams Gardens, we're spending time with Carol, not her garden. I don't read garden blogs to be informed (although that happens plenty, as well!) I read garden blogs because of the overwhelming enthusiasm, no, passion, that garden bloggers have for what they do. Passion shows itself in many ways. Some garden bloggers are prolific writers--they don't spend a day away from their blog because they're so excited to tell us what's going on, what they've learned, and even where they've failed. Some post less frequently, but their posts are so full of beauty and wonder that it's clear that they are completely enamored with what they do. Some of us occasionally use strong language to make a point in our enthusiasm for what we do. Each way is fine, because in the end it's about passion.

I can read vanilla, straightforward advice about gardening anywhere. I read plenty of it in newspaper columns and magazines. Hell, I write plenty of it for a living. This blog is my home, and when you visit my home, you get the real me, cuss words and all.

I know Doug was coming at the question from a professional garden writer's point of view. And here's what I have to say to that. If you Google my name, as almost anyone who is interested in working with anyone else professionally is bound to do nowadays, you will see plenty of online publishing credits that are written without any sign of profanity. You will see that, overwhelmingly, I am a professional. You'll find links to my LinkedIn profile, my About.com site, my old Suite101 articles, several mentions of me in the Detroit Free Press and other papers across the U.S., and a few of my social media profiles. If you were to have my resume in your hand, you'd find these credits, plus dozens of gardening and green living articles that don't bear my name because I've been contracted by other businesses to write them.

I've been called several things in my time as a blogger: effervescent, magnanimous, wonderful, blogosphere-changing (I still chuckle at that one, Susan!) but I've never once been called boring. I'll take that as my personal brand, any day.

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