(This story appeared in the Austin American Statesman last Saturday, April 26.)

Carol Michel is the rock star at the Spring Fling garden party. All the guests are garden bloggers, and they all read Carol’s May Dreams Gardens blog. Though the garden she writes about is in rural Indiana, she attracts readers far from her own USDA climate zone. It may be because she organizes the blogosphere-encouraging everyone to send in state-of-the-garden photographs on designated Bloom Days, convening a virtual garden book club, and inventing the Hoe Down to showcase pictures of cool hoes, posed and au naturel.    

Personally, I admire her for having codified the rules of accepting free plants. “Never, ever, thank the giver for the plant,” she writes. “. . .saying thank you keeps the plant from thriving.” This is the sort of thing you don’t know is true until an authority figure tells you it is. And now this authority figure is here in Austin.

“You know you’re a garden geek if you’ll get on a plane to visit a garden,” Carol says. “This is the furthest away I’ve flown.” She’s spent the weekend with 39 other garden bloggers, visiting Austin gardens and nurseries, hearing talks from local experts, eating barbecue and Tex-Mex, and bonding with people she previously only knew only online. As it turns out, a disproportionate number of them live in Austin. Though garden blogging itself is hardly more than five years old, at least 25 widely read Austin bloggers have come into bloom in the past two years.

So it made sense that the first national garden bloggers’ conference happened here.

“We garden bloggers are basically the same,” Carol Michel explains. “We’re introverted, but we want to share our gardens with people somehow.”

Most gardeners like the solitude of gardening, but can be quite social about it after the fact. Garden blogs would seem to be written in our kind of shorthand. Nevertheless, I resisted reading them right up until I launched my own. If I never quite caught up with the demands of my actual garden, I thought, where would I find to read about someone else’s, much less write about the chores I wasn’t doing?

As any Spring Flinger will attest, bloggers can spend untold hours  answering comments, guest-blogging, forming multi-blogger cartels, and leaving comments on other blogs. They take and format hundreds of high-quality photographs. Would it ultimately be more satisfying to plant another row of pole beans? I was ambivalent. The questions kept coming.

If weblogs are diaries, for instance, who edits out the boring bits? Is blogging just a complicated way to pop in on friends, much the way 1880s ladies left calling cards on each other, but much more often? Do we force ourselves to blog because they won’t take us seriously if we don’t-whoever they are? Should we “monetize” with Google ads and then have to keep track of the pennies that flow in? You’re supposed to “drive” people to your site like so many virtual cattle, but what then? Do you try to sell them wind chimes or something? What does it cost to mail wind chimes? How does one set up a Paypal account? What does this have  to do with gardening?

Plenty, as I learned from reading the seasoned bloggers, most of whom write for strictly for their own enjoyment, though some are gaining ground as freelance writers, landscape designers and garden coaches.

“I started just a year ago,” says Dee Nash, who writes Red Dirt Ramblings from the Oklahoma countryside. “I’d been writing for Oklahoma Gardener,” she says, “but I blog to write about what I actually care about, not just what to plant. I wanted it to be about passion.”

She chronicles her vast rose garden-”expanding was an obsession”-and the fact that she doesn’t like “just a rose garden. So I plant my roses with other things. If they don’t play well with others, they get ripped out.” Though her hands shook the first dozen times she hit the “publish” button, she now gets about twenty messages a day, each of which she answers personally. I like Dee’s fascination with weather and weathermen, and the way her Country Living visions fell apart when she moved out of the city. “They are citified fantasies,” she writes. “I actually live in Dogpatch or Deliverance. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell.” I read Dee to find out about Dee, but I’m also hoping for a few ideas about what to interplant with my roses.

In that way, scanning garden blogs is like prospecting with a metal detector, in that one man’s garbage is another’s collectible beer can. It’s a matter of taste. I don’t care if I never see another cat photo in a garden blog, but anyone who writes about the simple act of watering has my full attention. Just about every week, a new blog will pop up for me to investigate.

“Gardening is an extremely local act,” says Melissa Stevens of Austin-based Zanthan Gardens. “I’ve never said that I’m an expert on any plant, but I’m trying, in a more scientific way, to describe what’s happening in this yard, and to compare notes with other gardeners.”

Melissa’s been blogging since 2001, putting up stories of the Bouldin yard she’d tended since 1993, indulging a Thomas-Jefferson-like ability to write detailed observations on individual plants, and asking for help.

“I had all these books that said things like `plant in full sun’ but they really meant `plant in full sun in Connecticut,’” she remembers. “I wanted to know what that meant in Texas. I could have gone to the garden clubs, but I’m an introvert.”

Now her blog is full of high quality photographs, plant profiles, and the very useful section entitled A Southern Gardener’s Year. Readers may come for those things, but they stay for Melissa herself, as she moves from fancy irises to old roses to a garden deliberately filled in with good-looking weeds. As her large trees grow, her land becomes shadier, and her plants move around accordingly. And though her yard is a strictly solitary space, she socializes online with other Austin gardeners. Last year, a group of them finally met face to face over margaritas at the home of Pam Penick, a landscape designer who writes the top-rated Digging blog, and organized this year’s Spring Fling.

“It was like a family reunion, except most of us had never met each other,” Melissa says. “I still don’t know much about the other bloggers’ personal lives, but I could tell them what they were doing last Saturday in the garden.”

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