Welcome to the December meeting of the Garden Bloggers’ Book Club. We’ve all had a busy month of holiday preparations and celebrations interwoven with a few stolen moments in the garden due to warmer than usual weather (at least for some.)

But now it is time to fix a hot cup of tea and grab a few left over Christmas cookies and read through all the posts we have written about the December book selection, My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love edited by Jamaica Kincaid, or about our own favorite plants. To frame your reference for reading these entries, I encourage you to re-read Kincaid’s introduction, from which I quote the following (for those who didn’t have a chance to get a copy of the book or who have already returned their copy to the library):

“… I tried to arrange these essays and poems… in such a way as to give the illusion of a garden, a garden I would like (sometimes, only sometimes, feelings about a garden will change, too), a garden of words and images made of words, and flowers turned into words, and the words in turn making the flower, the plant, the bean (Maxine Kumin) whole.” … “At the end of it (the book), I hope the reader will have some satisfaction—not complete satisfaction, only some satisfaction. A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden—Paradise—but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.”

I’ve have not arranged these thoughts, opinions and writings about this book or the bloggers’ favorite plants in any order, other than the order in which I received them or found them. As you read through them, please freely comment at each site.

Jenn at Garden Djinn

Tracy at Outside

Gloria at Pollinators-Welcome

Genie at The Inadvertent Gardener

Gloria at Pollinators-Welcome

Martha – Earth Girl at The Good Earth

Colleen at The Garden Online

Kim at A Study in Contrasts

Beverly at In My Backyard

Sissy at Got Serenity

Carol at May Dreams Gardens

Tracy at Outside

Gloria at Pollinators-Welcome

Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening

Old Roses at A Gardening Year

Bill at Praire Point

Thank you all for participating in December, and I hope all can participate in January (even with all those seed catalogs to study!) Our book for January is Teaming with Microbes: A Gardeners Guide to the Soil Food Web by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis. We are completely switching gears with this book, away from essays about gardens and gardening to a book that is meant to improve our understanding of the very foundation of the garden, the soil. Watch for future posts about how to participate, even if you can’t get a copy of the book to read, or it just isn’t your type of book.