INTRODUCTION

It’s been said that “gardening is better than therapy and you get tomatoes.” I would agree. Gardening is also the combination of art and science. This book is a collection of activities I’ve used both professionally at Cleveland Botanical Garden and personally during the past twenty years. To me, gardening is everything good: exercise (but more fun), being outside (usually), communing with nature, and (hopefully) bettering a tiny patch of earth. I’m not a professional gardener, I’m not a horticulturist, but I do hang out with a bunch of them and ask a lot of questions. The biggest thing I’ve learned through these interactions is that all of those “rules” they learned in school are simply there to be broken.

Gardening is a personal endeavor, and whatever makes you happy should be what you do. If you love putting pinks and oranges together because they make you smile, then do it. If, instead of the rules of three, you prefer groups of four, then do it.

I get great ideas of things to do in my yard from daily walks with the dogs, plant catalogs, and Pinterest! From these same three places, I also see plenty of things I don’t want in my yard. Either way, you learn new things to implement—or not.