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Award winner author of gardening humor books

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May Dreams Gardens

Questions on Garden Names, Time Capsules and Birthdays

January 31, 2008 By Carol Michel 20 Comments

Who has named their garden?

I posted late last summer about having a name for your garden and how to go about naming your garden. Has anyone since named their garden and posted about it? Or maybe your garden already had a name and you posted about it?

I’d love to read about what people call their gardens and how they came up with the names for them.

Who has put together a time capsule?

I posted later in the fall about burying a time capsule in your garden. The ground is quite frozen here in central Indiana, so now is not a good time to bury a time capsule, but I could certainly put one together to bury in the spring. I’m going to do it!

Who else is considering a time capsule for their garden and what will you be including? I need some ideas for mine!

Who buys themselves their own birthday presents?

Buying yourself a present or two for your birthday is a sure way to get something you really want. I was very good to myself for my birthday earlier this month, very good. I wanted to get myself something I would have forever and something fun, too. No, I did not buy myself a new hoe, but that’s a good guess. Both of the items that I got relate to gardening, somewhat.

For the one item, I’d looking for some suggestions on good gardening video podcasts. I’ve not done much on the Internet with podcasts, but now that I have something to download them to and take them with me, I’m interested in them. Does anyone have any recommendations?

How long can a comment be?

I don’t think there is a limit on length of comments, but your answers may be longer than you want to put into a comment. That’s okay! Post answers on your own blog, then leave a comment here so we find you.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: gardening, gardens

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. growingagardenindavis says

    January 31, 2008 at 4:34 am

    Funny you should ask…I put the first coat of sealant on my sign this past weekend…two more and then I plan to post a photo! I did post about the name here.
    I’m curious about other garden names, too!

    Reply
  2. vonlafin says

    January 31, 2008 at 5:41 am

    I have not named my garden, maybe I had better put some thought into that this winter.

    Reply
  3. Sherry at the Zoo says

    January 31, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    Hmmmm….interesting thought. I’ll have to put some thought into that as well. Any suggestions?

    Reply
  4. Frances, says

    January 31, 2008 at 12:30 pm

    Great thought starters, Carol. Especially the birthday present for yourself. I like to name the garden, we have had to think of new names since we have moved several times over the years. Faire Garden can be applied to them all. If there is another move, it will be to another spot called Faire Garden also. That way you are always ‘home’.

    Reply
  5. Kathy says

    January 31, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    Wait a minute . . . hold on, here! Do you actually think you can tell us you were very good to yourself for your birthday and not tell us precisely what you got for yourself?! Inquiring minds want to know–especially this inquiring mind. Sure, you left a hint about one of the gifts with your question about podcasts, but you said “both.” That means two. I am a detail-oriented person and I want all the details!

    Reply
  6. Robin's Nesting Place says

    January 31, 2008 at 12:51 pm

    I wasn’t going to officially name my garden here because I view it as a temporary home. However, Robin’s Nesting Place has kind of become a part of me and my garden. I’ll probably use it where ever I garden though.

    Never did a time capsules.

    My husband hates to shop, and I’m a very practical person, so I always shop for myself and get exactly what I want. It works well for him and me too!

    Reply
  7. Entangled says

    January 31, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    I always buy myself birthday presents…and Christmas presents and Groundhog Day presents and…….

    I’ve never buried a time capsule, but I’ve saved newspapers and magazines that were current at the time of important life events (births, marriages, etc.) It’s interesting to look at them on anniversaries.

    Reply
  8. Anonymous says

    January 31, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    I love gardens. I just don;t happen to have one of my own. Fortunately the family I live with, who lives with me, do enjoy gardening, so I have the best of both worlds. I sit on my back deck & view a beautiful garden, but I don’t have to sweat over it. I’m not above giving suggestions, but I don’t need to often. Ahhhhhhh

    Reply
  9. WiseAcre says

    January 31, 2008 at 1:56 pm

    Come to think of it I do have a name I use often.
    The deer are in the @#$%^&* garden again!

    Reply
  10. Anonymous says

    January 31, 2008 at 2:13 pm

    I’ll want a bigger and more permanent garden before I name it. I should think up names for the future, though. And the time capsule is a nice idea for my current, more transient garden. Hmm…what’s today’s cheap collectible? I could make a future gardener rich! (Or at least afford a couple extra seed packets.)

    As for birthday presents, I occasionally buy my own. Also my husband can never think of anything to get me unless I tell him specifically what I want, so I more or less buy my own through him too.

    Reply
  11. Anonymous says

    January 31, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    I’ve been thinking of a name since your post Carol. My neighbor just put up a sign with his gardens name, Ledgemere! Drats, that would have been a good one! No name yet!

    No time capsule!

    I’m all for buying myself a birthday present. That way, you always get what you want.

    Reply
  12. Mr. McGregor's Daughter says

    January 31, 2008 at 6:10 pm

    After you suggested naming the garden, I did: Squirrelhaven, as memorialized in a post of that name. No sign yet saying “Welcome to Squirrelhaven.” I’m at the point where I just try to ignore my birthday, so, no, I don’t buy myself any birthday presents. A time capsule is always a good idea when one has children. I should try to do one this year.

    Reply
  13. Mary says

    January 31, 2008 at 7:40 pm

    I’ll be thinking about a name for the pond garden. It really should have a name.

    The best birthday gifts come from me :o) What did you get? I’ll bet it was a hoe.

    Time capsules are cool. We just realized two years ago that my daughter, around age 8, made a time capsule and slipped it between the concrete block and drywall in the basement of our home in MD. I’d love to go get it! Probably contained “New Kids on the Block” stuff.

    Reply
  14. Connie says

    January 31, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    When we bought our home nearly 20 years I redecorated all the rooms. Nearly every room ended up with some element of roses, in the wallpaper or curtains, etc., so my daughter and I decided to call our home “Rose Cottage”. Then for Mother’s Day one year I got a coupon from my family promising me a hedge of Simplicty roses and a white picket fence. I now have both, my Rose Cottage garden.

    Reply
  15. Aunt Debbi/kurts mom says

    January 31, 2008 at 10:30 pm

    I bought myself a $40 hoe one year fir nt birthday. My brothers had a field day with that one. I should name my garden. Does Aunt Debbis Garden count? Mayb Critter Country is more like it.

    Reply
  16. Anonymous says

    January 31, 2008 at 10:52 pm

    I got talked into naming my garden Green Hall after putting that on my shed last fall (see the comments on that post).

    I don’t buy my own birthday presents, but my husband and kids do a great job with that. And I’m pretty good about treating myself the rest of the year, anyway. 😉

    Reply
  17. Unknown says

    February 2, 2008 at 12:42 am

    I’ve never done a post on this, but our place is called Sunflower Hill…and I bought myself Christopher Lloyd’s last book (Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners) as a late Christmas/get-me-through-January present, which I will post about soon!

    Reply
  18. Silvia Hoefnagels . Salix Tree says

    February 2, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    Windywillow is my garden’s name. I first saw this name in a role-playing game for some small folk, hobbits or pixies, can’t remember. When we moved here to our country house 4 years ago, I saw there was a lot of fierce winds coming through. And my favorite tree is willow, so I thought it was a good name for the garden. I didn’t have any trees back then, now I have many, including 3 different types of willows, with a cutting of a contorted rooting.

    Reply
  19. Jean Campbell says

    February 3, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    Foxes Earth is the fanciful name for where we live and garden.
    Foxes do roam here.
    My FIL was a fox hunter here.
    Anne Rivers Siddons wrote a book called ‘Foxes Earth.’
    A man named Fox believed he would be reincarnated and build an elaborate ‘Earth’ on his property just in case. There is an earth up in some woods on my property, but it is not elaborate, just a den.

    No time capsule, but I do sometimes dig up artifacts when I’m planting.

    Reply
  20. Anonymous says

    July 18, 2008 at 8:12 pm

    Carol—I was so grateful to find your blog! I found it while Googling “garden names” and your wonderful piece about naming the garden assured me I’m not nuts (even though sometimes my husband thought so, as I’ve been putting so much energy into coming up with garden names). The overall name of our house and grounds is taken from the Indian name for this valley in Idaho: Cop-cop-pa-ala, the Much Cottonwood Meeting Place. The cottonwoods are just a fringe along the river valley, so it seemed to me that this name was in danger of fading into history and I wanted to save it, even if it is a bit long for a quarter-acre suburban lot with a single-story ranch house. I have poplar trees, cousins to cottonwoods, so it really works for me.

    Anyway, we built four formal vegetable gardens, and the paths between the squares are oriented exactly north-south, east-west. Gives the gardens the clunky names of northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest. This got old in my gardening journal really quickly. I started a name search. Harvest goddesses, outside of Ceres, are multisyllabic and didn’t fit the orientation in the world. My husband suggested regional foods—berry, maple, okra and mesquite—but that didn’t work for me. I wanted magic. While trying out regions and rivers in Idaho, regional plants, and all kinds of other things, we finally hit it: mythic places.

    The northern gardens are both vertical growing beds, with frames for growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans in a wall against the back of the yard. They are forests. The two southern beds are large expanses for everything else—herbs, peppers, anything that wants to bush or clump, and this year, a squash bed for things that want to run wild. They’ll change from year to year as I rotate crops and grow more interesting things. They are the fields.

    The Northwest bed is Sherwood, emblematic of the Pacific Northwest of my husband’s childhood. In the Northeast, the garden is named for the forest that lies north-central in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, LoriĂ©n. In the Southeast, as in the southern part of Britain, we find Avalon. The garden and home of the Great Goddess, eclipsed for so long, revered here. In the Southwest, we finally find El Dorado. Where the conquistadors failed, we will succeed with treasures of hot peppers and other fresh foods. Bringing the desert to life in small, shaded courtyards is something I love about the southwest, and this little square in our desert (we get 11 inches of rain per year here) is set up for the same destiny.

    I am making mosaicked cobbles with the four names to be nameplates for the four gardens. Thanks again for your great blog!

    Reply

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