Weeding the Web

Gifts for Gardeners: Gardening Cartoons by Chris Madden

Have you bought all your Christmas presents? Sent all your cards? If you're like me, you've barely started and any moment now the frisson of seasonal anticipation will turn to the jagged edge of panic. At the end of November, I met someone who had already baked six Christmas cakes and six Christmas puddings, written all her cards and bought all the many gifts needed for her extended family. I felt, to say the least, inadequate.

With a keen eye for gardeners, Chris Madden has created a range of garden cartoons and could be your answer to both cards and presents.

A Funny Year in the Garden is a collection of his gardening cartoons and would make a fun present, while prints of his work are available at Cartoon Stock.  (NB 2015, I wonder if the book is available direct from Chris - it's eye-wateringly expensive on Amazon.)

On his website, he features quite a number of humorous scenes which you download for a fee, paying £30 to print up to a hundred cards, so you’ll probably be most interested if you have a large mailing list. Still, it’s certainly an opportunity to send something a bit different.

A present for your vegetable gardener

Regular readers will have spotted that, when it comes to Christmas presents for gardeners, I like to leave the beaten track. After all, there’s always that gardener who has everything, or the one you wouldn’t dare give any equipment because they’re so fussy about what they use.

So here’s an quirky idea for your favourite vegetable gardener. Simon Drew is a prolific artist who seems to have cornered the market in humorous drawings applied to coasters and trays. If you don’t like puns, then you won’t like Simon, but if, like me, you enjoy a good groan or, more importantly, know someone who does, this is a fun present.

For a huge range of his work, you should visit Castle Melamine. But if they carry the ones I particularly like, then I can't find them.

Simon's "Vegetables of the Silver Screen" is a series taking off famous movies. Can you resist The Gourd, the Bad and the Ugly? Or The Marrow Widow? Or Bean Hur? There are others, but I don’t like to inflict too much pain.

Sets of six are available from Granny Macs Herbs ‘n’ More. If you don’t fancy coasters, then the designs can be found on a notepad fridge magnet, or on a mug in a tin.  

NB I've removed some links from here because the companies had disappeared. If anyone knows anywhere else you can get the veg coasters, then do please comment  below.

Noteworthy presents for gardeners (and their children)

December just around the corner, and naturally I’m not the only one whose thoughts are turning to Christmas presents.

Over at My Tiny Plot, Gillian has given a rundown on My Favourite Garden Notebooks and includes some rather attractive possibilities for the gardener in your life (or you, of course, if you print out the page and leave it lying around in a pointed fashion).

One that particularly caught my eye, for the kiddies, is Rosie Flo’s Garden colouring book (part of a series where you add limbs, as well as colour in). But Gillian has her own contribution to make to children’s presents with her board book Jackson’s Garden, which you can order via Etsy.  It's a sturdy book, which sees Jackson persuading a snail that leaves are better than lettuces (if only!) and Gillian's drawn pictures which offer opportunities for discussion and counting vegetables, allowing you to educate your little one while they're involved in the story.

Presents for gardeners from The Great English Outdoors

With the approach of Christmas, I’ll be looking for useful sites for more unusual presents for gardeners, and have just come across one I haven’t seen before, although, according to the website, it’s frequently featured in stylish…ah, that would be why…magazines such as House and Garden.

Last time, I pointed out that Growveg was the only site dedicated to gardening in the shortlist for the Good Web Guide’s Website of the Year awards. True, but in the gift category was not only Cox and Cox, whose recycled “slate” sundial I mentioned as a possible Christmas present last year, but The Great English Outdoors.

Athene English works with leather and showcases other craftsmen’s creations in her shop in Hay-on-Wye. She regards craftsmanship as the “expression of clear thought and intelligence in things made largely by hand” – which I think probably translates as using good design and materials.

Greenprints - Twenty Years of Garden Writing

This year has seen the twentieth anniversary of Greenprints, a delightful quarterly magazine, the autumn edition of which has just dropped through my letterbox.

Subtitled The Weeder’s Digest, and dedicated to the “human, not the how-to” side of gardening, it eschews information articles (so nothing on how to grow your cabbages or new blooms this season) and, instead, offers thoughtful, humorous and poignant essays inspired by gardens and gardening; it’s very personal writing.

Pat Stone, the editor, gives it a very warm touch. He himself is held in great affection by his readers, who like to be kept up to date with his family, so the mag usually includes a brief update on what’s been happening and, while Pat is editing, Becky his wife is i/c subscriptions.

It's a real mom-and-pop enterprise (as they say in the States), published from their home office in North Carolina, but that doesn't stop it being thoroughly professional. Pat was Garden Editor at Mother Earth News back in the 1980s, and has also co-edited Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul, one of the hugely successful Chicken Soup series.

Greenprints is a feel-good publication, featuring poetry, quotations and charming illustrations, as well as around fifteen stories per issue. One of the regular contributing editors, with a humorous outlook on life, is Mike McGrath, the erstwhile Editor-in-Chief of Organic Gardening Magazine (the US one, not the defunct UK mag) who is known over the Pond for You Bet Your Garden! a long-running syndicated Public Radio show. 

If you wonder if Greenprints is for you, then have a dig round past issues, where you get a rundown of contents and good flavour of what's inside. CD selections are also available.

And, given that I’ve just visited two garden centres, both of which were putting up their Christmas grottoes, I’ll just whisper very quietly that a subscription might make a jolly nice present for a garden enthusiast.

A watering solution for forgetful gardeners

Remembering to water pot plants is not my strongest suit. Last year, my windowsill chilli plant (Prairie Fire – very cute, eight inches tall) failed miserably, through no fault of its own, bravely offering up prematurely dried chillies between shrivelled leaves on its little twig branches.

So, much as I like to think I can overcome such weakness through sheer willpower, I was interested to try a Plant Genie Watering Globe. You see quite a lot of this sort of thing around. These are very sturdy handblown glass balls with a long hollow stem – fill with water and insert into the soil of your pot.

I got mine directly from the owner Charlie Silverlock when I visited his stand at the excellent Cranleigh Show, Surrey, last year. His company, free2garden, specialises in designer and hand-crafted garden ornaments.

Small backdoorshoes in abundance

Back in February I told you about my new purchase of Backdoorshoes, which I can say are continuing to do their job and delight me every time I slip them on. This weekend the Daily Telegraph featured Stephen Avery, who set up the company. He's a lesson in entrepreneurial spirit, having launched innovative ideas for twenty years.

Consequently, he seems to have developed a gut instinct for what might work but, as with all new ideas, he had to be willing to take a punt.  One the problems he hadn't anticipated was that, as the shoes are made in batches containing a variety of sizes, he's growing a small mountain of the less popular size shoes. Obviously he didn't watch the Dragons' Den episode in which Lesley-Anne Simmonds was advised of the same problem. It's just as well, because Avery seems to be doing well and has already managed to direct some of his surplus into schools' projects.

If you need a large number of small clogs, he's going to pleased to hear from you!

 

Gardening, gift wrapped

Presents for gardeners are easy to find. Cards can be another matter. Scenes of flowers abound and you’ll often find something funny involving sheds, but otherwise really pretty, relevant cards can be few and far between.

Equally, while I’m usually just glad to find a uncreased piece of paper big enough to cover the gift, some people put as much thought into their giftwrapping as they do their cards. And it’s touching when you realise how much thought a friend has given to the whole birthday “package”.

I constantly intend to do better and have found a super range of cards and wrapping right on my doorstep. Even better, the cards only cost £1 (less when I buy ten or more), which is a bargain these days. I can now give birthdays a gardening theme from the card to the wrapping paper to the gift tag. I might even enclose a bookmark as well.

Presents for Gardeners whose family can never find them

As the days get longer, and we spend more time in the garden, does your family have difficulty tracking you down? If you’re lucky, you’ve got a house that you can get lost in and a garden to match.

To maintain communication, you could invest in some walkie-talkies – my husband and I have found them very useful in supermarkets, although you do attract some strange looks (saying, “I’m by the frozen peas, over,” just makes you feel silly).

On the other hand, here’s a charming, lower tech, quieter solution from Pipany. Hang it on the back door knob, and at least they’ll know not to trawl the upper floors for you.

My socks are safe at last

It’s the sort of thing I say I’ll never buy and then am really glad I did.

Last week saw the Garden Press Event 2010, a gathering of around sixty companies, showing off their wares to garden designers and various media writers, journalists and presenters.

Old hands use it to meet friends, liaise with editors and, no doubt, focus tightly on their particular interests. Others, like me (or perhaps just me?) bounce from stand to stand like an enthusiastic puppy.

Old hands stroll out with a few items of interest. Others (er, me) stagger out under the weight of brochures, price lists, press releases and samples. So burdened was I that the ten-minute walk to Vauxhall station was out of the question; I had to take a taxi.

My purchase? Well, I’m not the only person to think them really useful. One of the organisers told the stallholders that they’d never sell them (the show being about marketing, not selling), but by the time I swung by half an hour before closing, most of the stock had gone.